I can't thank you enough. I had spent over 16 hours. Yes, 16, trying to trouble shoot this problem.
I've spoken with two tech support reps (Ian McCracken and Tamara London) and spent over 4 hours dealing with my local Apple Store.
I HOPE TO SAVE SOMEONE ELSE SOME TIME.
For the issue being discussed, it's practically pointless to try and get help through Apple regular suppport or store. They are given a script "restart the phone", "reinstall iTunes", "its your service provider" etc. And while everyone I've dealt with was competent for the most part, they have no clue what to do regarding this error message.
Why does Apple iTunes only recognize a corrupt file when trying to restore and NOT WHEN SYNCING OR BACKING UP?! The latter would seem most logical.
I went to the Apple store because my iPhone 6 128gb had the following issues:
- headphones were unplugged but the phone still registered them as plugged in
- phone shutdown despite having fully charge battery
- phone eventually powered up but touch screen was unresponsive
- screen eventually became responsive but both camera and flash were not responsive
Regarding these issues, a beyond helpful Apple rep at the Genius Bar (Nick at Saddle Creek, Germantown, TN) immediately replaced my phone.
From there I went home on his advise and began to restore my phone to my most recent backup. I did two backups as soon as my phone became operable assuming the worse prior going to the Apple store. From there I ran into this:
Problem -> the iPhone they gave me wasn't "updated to the most recent version of iOS", so I had to update it before restoring. Additionally, the new phone was by default set to automatically backup/sync to iTunes, overwriting my previous (valuable) backups. Afterwards, I was down to only one back up. Then the phone went into a permantent "Searching" mode for cellular signal.
From there, I tried to backup my phone over 9 times (it was a 65gb backup; taking roughly 1 hour 15 minutes each time). Each time I was greeted with the same ominous message: "this back is corrupt or incompatible with this iPhone" when it was ~15 minutes from completion.
At this point I had reached nightmare scenario.
I went back to the Apple Store, flagged down Nick from the previous day, and he replaced my phone. I took the new phone home. Spent $30 dollars and got the Decipher program. During this process I got a call back from Tamara and told her about my progress. Amazingly she was unaware of the 2 or 3 programs "iPhone Back Up Extractor", "Decipher" etc that specialized in repairing damaged iPhone backup files. I told her about this one and proceeded to restore my phone.
DECHIPHER TOOLS -
The first restore went exactly like my previous 6 restores - same error message after an hour and 15 minutes.
The advanced restore method however, scanned each individual file on the back and identified the corrupt files, and was SUCCESSFUL.
I cannot exaggerate how big of a lifesaver Decipher Tools was for me. I literally begged Apple to provide a solution to granting me access to my backup file to no avail.
TLDR: pay the ~30 dollars and get your files back. Don't waste your time repeating your situation to Apple Support ad nauseam that simply isn't equiped to handle your problem.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS FOR THIS ISSUE:
1. Allow customers to take both phones (new and defunct phone) home to ensure files are successfully transferred to replacement. At the time I was forced to surrender my phone with all my data in order to receive the new phone. Had I had my old phone, I could have done an additional error-free backup
2, Alllow reps to recommend 3rd parties/proprietary companies like Decpher/iPhone Backup etc.
3. Buyout Decipher or another company that has figured out a way to fix this issue. It's ridiculous that I had to pay some obscure software company $30USD to backup/restore my iPhone successfully after paying over $1000USD for a phone.