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

Day one my wife and I got our new iPhone 6s (with iOS 9.0). We did an iCloud restore from our iPhone 5s with iOS 9.0.1 and it was successful bringing all our data including Messages and Recent Calls. The phones were then updated to iOS 9.0.1. Everything was working fine...


My phone had an issue which ended up getting me a replacement iPhone 6s (iOS 9.0). From here I tried restoring from the past iPhone 6s (with iOS 9.0.1) iCloud restore. Unfortunately, Messages and Recent Calls did not come over from the past iPhone 6s backup and I even tried various of the iPhone 6s time stamped backups. I also updated the new iPhone 6s to 9.0.2 and still no difference with the restore. It wasn't until I reverted back to my iPhone 5s backup (iOS 9.0.1) that it would bring the Messages and Recent Calls over. Note that the inclusion of the Messages and Recent Calls is evident immediately after the initial restart from restore (when the phone starts downloading apps). This has me worried going forth and here is why!


I've done a new backup and a little digging. I've noticed that both my new backup for the iPhone 6s and wife's are both smaller than our iPhone 5s backup was. Example for my device backups: iPhone 5s: 18 GB, iPhone 6s: 17.1 GB. Note that this seems backwards as if there was any difference for whatever reason, I would imagine that it be on the larger resolution device. Also, this difference in size would seem reasonable for not including Messages (includes messages, videos, audio, etc.) and Recent Calls. There may even be other data that this did not bring over as I did not see it benefit in losing years of messages for a week of new data, i.e. I did not research the loss to the full extent.


Has anyone else experienced this issue recently with an iPhone 6s or maybe there is a known issue I just have not stumbled across.

iPhone 6s, iOS 9.0.2

Posted on Oct 3, 2015 5:37 AM

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Posted on Oct 13, 2015 4:28 PM

I Spent 6 hours with the geniuses and no one thinks this is a big issue!!!!


not sure if you noticed, but after a restore where all your messages are gone, if you do get new messages, you will not get notified, they will not be in chronological order, if you get multiple messages, the order doesn't change, and most importantly, if you turn your phone off and back on, all those messages will be erased. (this last part they "fixed" by resting settings)

198 replies

Dec 3, 2015 8:28 AM in response to Letapa

Read above. As long as you didnt overwrite your iCloud backup after losing all your messages you can restore it properly now. You wont get any of the data you recorded between restores but 5+ years of data is better than losing only a week.


The white screen/black apple logo freeze is also gone. Apple appears to have fixed the 'server issue.' Thank you to everyone who bugged Apple (r-m you in particular) for helping to fix this.

Dec 3, 2015 9:25 AM in response to r-m

Sorry! In my excitement I said the exact opposite of what I meant to say.


Editing the post to fix it, hah.


EDIT: It appears I can't edit the post. Just to clarify, I meant to say that all the missing data has been restored after restoring my iCloud backup. Of course, this means users affected by this bug will have to restore one of their old backups to get their old data back, and they'll lose message data and health data from between now and the date of the backup you restore.

Dec 3, 2015 9:28 AM in response to JacksterD

Fantastic. I'm glad it's fixed for people :-) About an hour left of work until I can go home an try mine!


I have asked the Executive support guy to forward an email on to the engineering team for me, asking about current state of the bad restore.

My iPhone has the broken restore from 14th November, which I've been using since then. I've asked them if I back this up to iCloud, then restore it back to my iPhone, will it be okay? I've asked if there's a way of keeping both the data up to 14th, and the data between then and now.


If it's a case of backing up to iCloud and them going in and fixing something, that'd be awesome... I'll try myself tonight anyway, and will let people know how I get on.

Dec 3, 2015 9:28 AM in response to pardthemonster

IIt's good that they fixed it but for the original people who experienced this issue in October, it's not much of a use to us now. Since all this does is allow us to choose betwen am empty phone and in tact restore from 30 days ago. We had this exact option when the problem started. We had the ability to restore from the back up of our 6 on September 25th when we got our 6S.


FOr for people who just experienced the issue its awesome. For myself unfortunately it's now been too long that if have to again lose a month of new data.


so I'm sticking to my decision I made last month. Backed up the texts from the September backup, using iExplore. And starting with fresh phone.


B.

Dec 3, 2015 9:29 AM in response to Tawkers

That's kinda what I wanted to know from them. If people have stuck with the restore that had bad data, were to now back up to iCloud, will it be fixed and will there be all data there.


If there's not, they could do with providing a tool to merge the two sets, or at least do it themselves.

Dec 3, 2015 9:38 AM in response to Tawkers

With this iExplorer, can you insert data too or just extract? I assume you cant insert. But is there an app on jailbreak that could so we can merge the text messages?

I've been using my phone from back up I did on iTunes in mid October. I'm missing my text messages from mid october to mid november when it was backed up to icloud.

Dec 3, 2015 3:36 PM in response to jmco173

I'm just about to try that myself. It's taken ages to do a backup to iCloud!

I think it may only work for existing backups and not new ones.


I've just done a backup to iTunes and had a look at the diagnostic information that transferred over.

There's several HealthDB logs, and the majority say it's inaccessible/corrupt.

So my guess it is it wasn't just a case of health app not being able to read the data, but the health database actually locked, so iOS couldn't read/write info, and so nothing new could be saved.


So, my backup from 14th November will be the most recent available with the latest health data possible 😢

Shame I can't verify that with apple though. I'll see what they reply tomorrow, from the email I sent earlier today questioning the above.

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

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