iCloud Restore for iPhone 6s - Missing Messages/Recent Calls Missing

looks like icloud is permanently broken. This is not even the worth $0.99 I pay to Apple per month. Billions of dollar earnings and 94% of global smartphone profits and yet they are allowing this to continue for owners with the latest 6S with no proper solution at all. I lost all my texts and health data.

As jmco173 says, it may all be lost for existing backups that were created since the issue started.

Not sure when exactly that was though, as people on here have had mixed results.

Deleting existing backups will definitely lose your data though, so wait until you speak to Apple before doing that.

I had hope that the "troubleshooting" mode that apple support enabled for my account, would allow them to fix my backup. But I think that was just terminology which basically got me to change password so they could restore the backup themselves to see what happens.

they also suggested to turn your icloud back up off so it wont replace the old back up with the missing messages/info, until they figure it out.

Unfortunately, I just found this thread. I am still having this issue as of yesterday.

1. Backed up at 5:00pm ET yesterday.
2. 6:00pm ET - Received a new iPhone 6S+ replacement (cracked screen for old iPhone 6S+). I was concerned that my new replacement 6S+ backup wouldn't work correctly, but Genius Bar told me to erase my old phone.
3. Genius Bar rep said we were done and walked away. I stayed to double check that the phone was working. I was unable to restore the backup (greyed out) because the replacement phone was old firmware (not 9.1).
4. I alerted the rep, they updated my phone by connecting to a Mac.
5. I went home and restored from iCloud. During the restore, I also experienced the frozen Apple screen, so I hard reset. After the hard reset, the restore appeared to be working. Photos were downloading. However, all my messages were gone!
6. I went to bed, hoping the restore would fix my messages overnight.
7. That's when I started doing research and found this thread. Really frustrating.

Is the issue that the iCloud backups don't have any message data? Or is the issue the backup restore?

My guess is it's the former. The amount of space used on my phone is 18GB and my iCloud backup is ~17GB. So it seems the phone restored everything that was backed up on the cloud correctly, but the messages were never backed up. I know I had like 8GB+ of messages.

Do you know if Apple support is able to recover a deleted backup? Like others have reported, I had no issues upgrading from my 6+ to 6S+. However, I deleted the backup for the 6+ yesterday morning!

Overall, this is an extremely disappointing and frustrating experience. If the Genius Bar had told me there was a potential glitch with iCloud backing up messages on 6S, I would've done the manual Mac backup.

Its not just messages, but all app data including messages and health, and any third party apps.

I Believe the data is in the iCloud backup, but it's not making it onto the device for some reason.

I restored my iCloud backup then checked my logs, and it seems that iOS is "simply" unable to read the data. It makes me think there's a permissions issue going on.

I also backed my phone up after doing that, and used a third party backup explorer tool and could see a sizeable health database there. That also makes me think the information is there, but as I say above, iOS can't read it.

I Agree, it's extremely disappointing. I still cannot believe Genius staff are still recommending an iCloud backup/restore when the issues still present.

I spent an hour on the phone with my Senior Advisor today. The only actionable advice was to retry the restore. I was also trying to get her to restore a deleted backup of my iPhone 6 Plus from September 2015 (pre-S launch), hoping that it wouldn't be corrupted. She couldn't, unfortunately.

I did a backup of my current phone. So now there are two iPhone 6S Plus Backups:

1. Old iPhone 6S Plus Backup: 18GB
2. New iPhone 6S Plus Backup: 9GB

I recall my messages being around 8-9GB on my old phone. So this difference between #1 and #2 would seem to confirm that the messages are in the backup, it's just the restore process is crashing / not working properly.

I tried to do the restore again (erased content & settings) then restore from iCloud Backup. It said "22 minutes remaining" and then a minute later dropped down to "2 minutes remaining." The phone then froze on the screen with the Apple logo again.

I am now trying a backup from July 2015 from an old iPhone 6 Plus (non S). We'll see it if works.

Update: The July 2015 backup worked fine and text messages / call log was restored perfectly. Frustrating. Seems to be indeed the iCloud backup is corrupted somehow.

I have also had the exact same issue when restoring from a 6S backup

I have tried multiple ways of fixing it, backing up & restoring from iCloud, iTunes etc. on more than one device but my current backup is just corrupted unfortunately.

There is still 68mb of 'Health' data under my Storage & Usage, hopefully they release a fix where the app gets fixed. I am interested to know if my Health data is being logged even though the app is not working correctly!

The Health app seems to be the app that is most affected by this restore bug

I've also noticed the below in regards to the Health app;

1. You can manually add a data point, but it will not show up at all.
2. You can add another item to your dashboard, it will appear in your Dashboard but once you quit & open the app again the Dashboard will be back to default.
3. Exporting Health data via the 'share' icon in the top right hand corner does not work.
4. In the 'Sources' tab, no apps that have requested access to Health data appear (Strava etc.)
5. My Medical ID displays fine & correctly

ios 9.2 just came out. Any chance this will fix it? Maybe updating, then trying a restore from the again once on 9.2?

I've updated OTA (over-the-air, via the Settings app) to 9.2.

I Reset/erased all content and settings on the device.

I restored my 15th November iCloud backup.

The data was still missing.

9.2 hasn't fixed the issue for me.

I've been doing some tinkering.

I found a very old backup of my iPhone 6 on a backup of a backup of my Mac.

I've jumped into that using iMazing backup explorer, and can successfully read that health database and see information within it.

Trying the same for my 14th November backup (after backing it up to iTunes to be able to get to the database), the database is inaccessible.

Doesn't help anything, but my thinking is that iCloud somehow borked the password protection on that file. Data could be written into it, but some point during the iCloud backup/restore, it got broken.

I still think this is something Apple can fix in individual iCloud backups, to allow us to restore.

I'm not giving up.

I also had the exact issue when restoring from iCloud backup on my replacement iPhone 6s Plus which was on iOS 9.1.

When restoring from iCould backup the restore freezes at end with White screen with black Apple logo. You have to hard reset or turn off the phone to get passed this stage. After restoring from iCloud backup I had no iMessages history, no call history, no health app data, no voice memos and many apps crashing at launch.

Opened a support case with Apple support yesterday and got escalated to their senior engineer which I spent few hours trying to fix the issue with no luck. They advised me to set the phone as new! because my iCould backup was corrupt.

The following steps fixed the issue I had:

1. This morning I have wiped/reset my iPhone (Erase all contents and settings)
2. Connect to iTunes and restore to factory settings
3. Upgrade to iOS 9.2 (Released on 8th December)
4. Restore from iCould backup.

When restoring my iCloud backup this time it did not freeze with white screen at the end of the restore and I have all my iMessages history, call history, health app data and voice memos back as it should be.

It looks like they have fixed the bug on this new iOS 9.2 release.

Hi - When was it that you initially had the issue with the replacement 6s Plus?

I updated to 9.2 last night (on the device, not a full restore/upgrade on iTunes, which I'll try tonight) and it still didn't resolve my issue.

Hi,

I got my 6s Plus replaced on Monday evening and tried to restore from iCloud backup while I was at the Apple store. I have tried the steps above this morning and I have got everything back now.

DIgitalMind - when was your backup created And then last updated?

Did you do a full and new backup on Monday?

For example, I backed up on Sunday but it was using an existing backup (only took 2 minutes to update). Just trying to figure out if 9.2 fixed it or your backup was aactually not corrupt.

Thanks for posting though! Super helpful!!

I had an automatic iCloud backup that was created early on Monday and just before I got my replacement device the Apple engineer at the Apple store created another iCloud backup which took only few minutes.

I have a feeling it was the 9.2 that fixed my issue. I have tried the same backup 3 times on 9.1 which all of them failed but when tried it after carrying the above steps and upgrading to 9.2 it worked fine.