Lost all my Apple Watch Activity history after broken iPhone.

Apple requires Health data to be encrypted due to privacy concerns. Having spent the last 27 years in the software business, I think you would have been better informed regarding Apple's many public statements on the subject.

From Back up your Apple Watch - Apple Support:

"To back up Health and Fitness data, you need to use iCloud or an encrypted iTunes backup."

Ah, yes, thank you. RTFM - the safe harbor for lazy product people the world over :-)

I admire Apple and use its products partly because it is the best at eliminating the need to "go read something somewhere else". And RTFM certainly has a place, just not in the area of backup and restore.

I submit that the best place to address this would be at the point of user interaction - the iPhone backup UI in iTunes. Let's examine the current UI:

There are two main options - backup to iCloud, and backup to Computer.

Backup to iCloud says it will backup "your most important data" to the cloud. (Not sure what someone at Apple considers my most important data - guess I'll have to go somewhere else and read something.)

Backup to Computer states that it is a "full backup" of your iPhone. Yes, that's what I want. No, it isn't. Only the encrypted backup to your computer is a "full" backup.

So, if they changed the options to "do a partial backup" and "do a full backup (encrypted)", then we would be better informed about our selections. I do give them credit for changing the wording under encrypted backups to include Health data, but I didn't hustle over to change my backup selections when I got my Watch. (And why didn't they add Apple Pay in there?). Oh well, lesson learned.

sable281 wrote:

I submit that the best place to address this would be at the point of user interaction - the iPhone backup UI in iTunes. Let's examine the current UI:

OK, as you wish:

No, I mean partially, just Health and Activity data.

I haven't read that personally. Actually I'm using iCloud backup but before my phone replacement because I had no WiFi access for a week, I did a manual FULL iTunes backup. There's 'Backup Now' on the right side. When you click on that it first ask you about your apps and purchases and then about encryption but when you choose don't encrypt it doesn't alert you that it will not back up EVERYTHING or you will loose your health data. It is absolutely UI flaw. and you can see people are loosing their health data everyday.

eafzali wrote:

No, I mean partially, just Health and Activity data.

Then I'm afraid the answer is no.

Sadly I lost all my health and activity data as well when I had to reset due to issues of my icloud drive not showing up on any of my mobile devices. When I tried to restore from my backup the icloud drive problem came back so I had to make the decision to lose the history that resided on my phone. WHY - does this information reside on the device and not in the cloud???? I switched to apple watch from Nike fuelband and never had issues with losing data. Apple needs to fix this if they expect to be somewhat competitive with other wearable activity trackers in the market or allow the activity data to be tracked by another app.

I agree. Disappointed with lack of warning. Not worth using until this is fixed. I have lost connectivity more than 4 times and this is the first time I lost data due to restoring iPhone and Watch.

Thank you papjo. Thorough answer. It still leaves me unhappy with Apple. How is a regular user supposed to know that? Why are the two back-ups different? Why only if encrypted? Why refer to the "i" symbol that doesn't exist (when trying to do a match manually)? Why no actual help or instructions at all? And so on. I now know why I lost all my data, good. But I've still lost it.

Hi, not sure if this helps But I have been using the health app and personalized it for certain health issues. tracking my glucose level etc. I lost everything once and was so upset. I poured through the notes and realized I had not setup to backup health in iCloud. I bit the bullet and set it all up again and yesterday my iPhone died, I was able to get it running but did a complete restore. No health data. bummer. tried again, no health data. now I'm ****** off. Learned about the need to turn on encryption for iTunes backup (makes a lot of sense for security) but I used iCloud and understood I was covered. Then I thought for a minute. It seems that I was attached to my mac so no matter what I did my restores were coming from the iTunes backup, not my iCloud. I did Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Setting on my iPhone while it was not connected to my mac and it asked where to restore from and I pointed to a iCloud backup and bingo bango I restored my health data. Yea Me!

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but the https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204518 page is a little confusing. Do all of the iPhone iCloud / encrypted backups include the Apple Watch data, or only the backups done when the Apple Watch has been unpaired from the phone?

If it's the latter, that's obviously not great. Who wants to unpair/repair their watch constantly just to get a complete backup?

Also, it'd be wonderful if they'd fix the iCloud backups. The whole thing is moot since I didn't know about the encrypted/unencrypted difference in backups, and I didn't have the option to use the iCloud backup! I'm seriously not pleased about losing 4 months of Activity data. Though at least it wasn't a couple years' worth.

When I've unpaired my watch ( I got a new phone ) a backup was created and when I went to pair it with the new device I was offered every backup that had been done for my watch so I picked the latest one. You can delete the older ones but apparently they are all stored somewhere.

I later had to perform a restore of my phone for various issues. All Health and Activity data from when I first got my watch was restored in the process. So you will get all your data back without worrying about the watch backups.

Also when when I first got my new phone and set it up by a restore from the previous phone's backup all the existing Health and Activity data both from the phone itself as well as any sourced from the watch was now on my new phone.

I just had to reset my iPhone. Had a "back-up" in iTunes. Got all of my information back except for the Activity Ap History. Lost all that fitness data from May 2015 till now. It would be a good idea to let people know of this gliche. That's an awful lot of fitness information to have lost. Shame on Apple for not letting us know about this.

I also lost all my activity data. I only use iCloud for backup, so it's not the encryption issue. I had to restore my phone when the iOS 10 update failed (1st hour issue) and restored from the last iCloud backup that normally occurs each night.

So for someone moving from one iphone to another, the only way to move Health & Activity data to the new iphone is:

1. Backup and restore from icloud. May be cost prohibitive if you can't backup and restore selectively
2. Backup and restore from itunes WITH encryption turned on

Now that I already did an un-encrypted restore and have 3 new days of data, are my only options the following?:

1. Do an encrypted backup with my old iphone (I still have it) and restore to the new iphone and lose the most recent data, OR
2. Keep the last 3 days, and lose all my previous data