I had a prior Apple Watch that I had unpaired through the iPhone app (not from the watch itself). My understanding is that a backup of the watch is made when it is unpaired. I now have a replacement watch and would like to restore that backup. How do I do that? I went through the watch setup process and was never offered an opportunity to restore from backup. Both watches were 38mm Sport watches, though this new one is a different color.
Thanks!
Hi
When pairing and setting up Apple Watch, you are given the option to either set it up as a new watch or to restore it from a previous backup (tap on Restore from Backup, as described during step 4 of the set up process in the support article linked below). It seems that you have chosen the former of these options.
You can unpair your watch and pair it again, this time choosing the second option. Be sure to select a later backup than the most recent one, otherwise you will only restore it to its present state again.
Thanks for the response, Jonathan! I paid close attention and was never given this option during setup, but I'll give unpairing/repairing it a try and see if that helps.
Unpairing and re-pairing worked. Thank you!
You're most welcome! 🙂
There's one more wrinkle to consider:
I was upgrading to a new watch, and during setup it would not offer a restore from backup. The problem is that the factory OS on the new watch was 2.0.1, while my old watch's backup was from watch OS 2.1.
I had to set up the new watch as new, then update the OS to 2.1, then unpair it and pair it again. That gave me the option to restore from the original backup of the original watch.
[Must be just like iPhone backups, you can't restore a backup from a newer OS than the phone is running.]
Wow. Thank you for posting this. It was very helpful. Today I just bought an Apple Watch to replace my Watch Sport (gave it away) and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the most recent update would not show up on when I was restoring to the new Apple Watch. Search and searched and finally landed to this thread and saw your post. Thanks a bunch!!! 🙂
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