iTunes Requires Password for iPhone Restore

Recently I had a huge problem restoring my iPhone 6 with iOS 10.0.2 from a backup in my Windows 10 computer. I'll describe it briefly and hope it helps someone.

I wanted to upgrade my iPhone 6 from iOS 9.x to iOS 10.x. Before upgrading I decided to backup the phone. My MacBook Pro would not accept the the backup because it was out of space, so I used my Windows 10 computer and backed up to the computer (not to iCloud). The backup went smoothly. It was NOT an encrypted backup. No password was requested.

After this backup I went ahead and upgraded the iPhone 6 to iOS 10.0.2. Because of battery problems I'd been having, I wanted to set up the phone as new and then restore the backup I had made. I went through Settings->General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings.

After the reset, I connected the iPhone to the Windows computer, fired up iTunes, went to the iPhone area in iTunes and clicked Restore Backup (from This Computer). A popup with a dropdown asked me to select which backup to restore from, and obviously I picked the latest one (by the way, this was a bit confusing, because the actual date/time of the backup I wanted was not listed, only the current date/time - weird). After clicking OK, another popup appeared asking me to enter a password. This is where the nightmare began...

Password? PASSWORD?? WHAT password??!! I didn't enter a password when backing up, nor did I encrypt the backup, which I believe would have required a password. Ok, fine, I entered my Apple ID password. No good. Entered older Apple ID passwords. No good. How about my Windows logon password? Uh-uh. Reset my Apple ID password outside of this with another device. Didn't work. What about the iPhone passcode? Worthless. What the heck? And, by the way, every time you try, a popup appears with a progress bar , looking like everything worked, but after ten or fifteen seconds it comes back and says it couldn't restore because the password was incorrect! Incredibly time-consuming.

To make a long story short, if this happens to you, iTunes is looking for the iPhone passCODE, not a passWORD. Note the language difference: iTunes keeps using the word passWORD, but actually it's looking for the iPhone passCODE.

Now, I had actually tried my passcode and it didn't work, so what gives? Well, iTunes is wanting the passcode that was in effect when you made the backup. In my case, after I made the backup I upgraded to iOS 10.x. iOS 10.x requires a 6-digit passcode, whereas my backup of iOS 9.x had a 4-digit passcode. When trying the restore, and after all the passWORD attempts, when I was trying a passCODE I was entering the new 6-digit passcode rather than the old 4-digit one that was in effect when I made the backup. Seems obvious, but believe me, it was not, with iTunes' confusing language in the popups!

So, there you have it. Shame on Apple for such a confusing situation!

I hope this helps you 🙂.