Lost all my Apple Watch Activity history after broken iPhone.

IF you restored the phone from an iCloud backup your watch data would also be restored. If you restored from an iTunes backup that data would be there only if you were encrypting those phone backups. If you weren't then the data is gone.

When you unpaired the watch a backup to your phone would have been created and then had you done an iCloud or encrypted backup to iTunes that data would have been preserved in a subsequent restore. Then when you re-paired the watch to the new phone you, I believe, would have been given the option to restore from that original unpaired backup.

I have the same problem. I have an unencrypted iTunes backup and a 15 days older iCloud backup. I have restored my iTunes backup but all my activity and health data has been lost.

is there any way that I can import my health data from my older iCloud backup?

eafzali wrote:

is there any way that I can import my health data from my older iCloud backup?

Sure. You can do that by using the iCloud backup to restore your iPhone. On your iPhone, do Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

You will then set up your iPhone as if it just came out of the box. Once you sign on using your Apple ID, you will be given the opportunity to restore your iCloud backup.

Lost all of my activity data, too. Having spent the last 27 years in the software business, I can tell you that this is just bad/sloppy/lazy software development and product management. A backup is a backup. Why does it have to be encrypted to save activity data? Why not state that requirement clearly up front? Because they were sloppy, that's why. The other strong possibility is that the iCloud backup requirement exists to entice you to pay to store your 64GB iPhone content in their cloud and pay for the space. I guess I could stomach that, if Apple would tell me CLEARLY how to get rid of the 19.1 GB of "Other" data on my iPhone (more sloppy software development).

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!