can I pair my watch to new (replacement) phone without losing all iWatch data?

The health data only gets backed up/restored if it's encrypted. If you didn't encrypt backups, or didn't have a full backup, you might have lost it.

OTOH, if you *do* have an encrypted backup, resetting the watch is safe

Your only way forward, I'm afraid, is to reset the watch and start again

If you were doing iCloud backups with your phone then you can restore it from that and you will get your watch data back. If you restore from an iTunes backup, as the other poster stated, those backups must have been encrypted to retain the watch data.

Just to note that iCloud backups *also* need to be encrypted if you want to retain Health/Activity data

Only the local iTunes backup needs to be encrypted.

Back up your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Thanks - I missed that

I'm not sure what the difference is or how you would manually encrypt an iCloud backup. It seems the risk would be the same whether restoring from iTunes or iCloud so why is one encrypted and the other is not? Unless iCloud backups are just automatically encrypted.

You set the encryption option in iTunes, in the same panel where you choose whether to back up to iTunes or iCloud. The way the options are laid out, it looks as if the Encrypt Backup option apples either way.

FWIW, I backup to iCloud by default, but if I'm making a major change to an iDevice (such is iOS upgrade/restore) I do a full backup to iTunes first and use that as my restore point if I need to.

nick101 wrote:

FWIW, I backup to iCloud by default, but if I'm making a major change to an iDevice (such is iOS upgrade/restore) I do a full backup to iTunes first and use that as my restore point if I need to.

I do too and I have always used iTunes to set up a new device from the iTunes backup of the previous device. I tried the iCloud restore once a couple of years ago and the results were not satisfactory.

it is very easy. You have to reset your iwatch and It will able to re pair. Today I got a new phone cuz my old phone broke. And I could not pair the two together. What I did was go to settings on iwatch n then general after that go all the way down to reset and after which u should be able to pair the two no problem. N it will restore ur setting from the automatic backup. Don't worry about that.

After resetting my Apple Watch and pairing to my new replacement iPhone, I found it asked me to restore form backup or continue as new. Thanks for the help.

Serko it was easy for you because you probably had iTunes set to enable encryption before you reset the Watch so that means you were backing up all the data on the Watch. If that checkbox isn't checked it won't back up all the Watch data and if you do the reset you may not have a backup to go from. Just a heads up for anyone else reading this, if you don't know that you were encrypting data when you were backing up, you may not find it as easy as Serko did.

The box we're referring to is in iTunes when you back up the phone, in the Summary window, under Backups there is a checkbox that says, "Encrypt iPhone Backup" and it says next to it, "this will allow account passwords and health data to be backed up." Check that box and run your backup and you'll be set and you can feel safe doing a reset on the Watch.

I don't do iCloud backups and I noticed that checkbox isn't available under iCloud backups so IDK if iCloud backs up that data or not. I don't think it gets everything, which is why I don't use iCloud for my backups. I do it on the computer.