Unsolvable 3.5 year iPhone Glitch - Engineers & Phone Geniuses Only!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I will be.

Regardless of whether it's an iCloud account issue (which I said above - apologies) - or a *phone backup* issue (which is still related to Apple if you can get on iCloud from a new phone) - it's still corruption. Apple is blocking you somehow or for some reason.

You either use iCloud, or you play with fire. I wrote an article on this in 2015 - researched and tested for 5 months. It's worse now.

Without iCloud you lose a ton, including (drumroll) reliable backups from device > device. There is no good third party solution for system-level info, messages (unless you use a third party app), and an increasing majority of third party APP data (I was surprised it's all going to iCloud Drive).

This isn't Windows or Linux. It's Apple.

Start over. Create a new account. Then backup via iCloud.

(photos, videos, documents can be backed up to Google, Amazon, MS OneDrive, etc.)

eightyf0ur wrote:

I absolutely must keep the SMS/iMessage and move to my new device, for work and legal reasons.

As for my collection of photos, I'd like to keep all 47,000 in chronological order and transfer them to the 512GB of storage I have.

Somewhere - somehow - there is a software that can transfer specific content without moving iOS components. Just a few years ago, a machine existed called Cellebrite that moved JUST CONTENT and SMS/iMessage from device to device. It's possible - I just need to find the right person who knows what software does what, as Cellebrite no longer makes the machines or software.

The easy-out solution is to start over, but I'm not satisfied with that. There's a way.

Nope. There is no software or machine that can do what you want.

If you have to keep the messages for legal reasons, there are 3rd party software packages that can extract them from an iTunes backup. It can NOT put them back on the phone, but you will have them available and can print them out or archive them as you see fit. Photos can be extracted just like they can be from any digital camera and stored on your computer. Why in the world you would want to bog down your phone with 47,000 photos is beyond me. No reasonable person needs to carry them all with them all the time. You can sync whatever photos you want on your phone back using iTunes, or once you have fixed the problem of not being able to log into iCloud by starting over, you can use iCloud photo library to keep them available at all times.

Now now.. but I totally agree the "just erase it and start anew and stop asking questions" solution for pretty much every complex question asked here is a infuriating cop out. Also I have 211.03 GB of photos/videos although they're not all on 1 phone out of sheer laziness, literally 23,000 unread emails and so on so it's really not that unusual...

So what exactly is the solution??

I'm confused what you mean by the files when transferred are "out of order". Files are all actually stored by their inode number and all other sorting options like chronological, size, etc. are done by you/Finder and these preferences are not stored as part of the file. It's possible that you're not transferring the metadata for the files where things like the correct creation date, use count, last access, etc. are stored but that all is decided at transfer time based on the methods of the actual utility (aka what I mention below which are stone ages programs like cp that macOS requires/uses natively) you or the program you use to transfer them employs.

If the only issue is the order of your files than you should be able to easily manually transfer the files in the Terminal using the wide range of options available with something like cp or pax which is probably what a paid software program will use except you have a graphic user interface to these command line utilities. Using stat to analyze the properties of a file just for good measure, then cp to transfer them is all you'd need and very very simple...

eightyf0ur wrote:

So what do I do? How do I get ALL of my texts (iMessage AND SMS and ALL of their content), pictures, and videos, voice memos, and app data from device to device? In the order they were taken? Into the proper location they belong?

The simple answer is, "you don't".

Back in 2015, something on your phone got corrupted. That corruption made its way into your backup. So long as you continue trying to carry that corrupt data forward, you will continue having problems.

Put your phone into recovery mode. Restore iOS. Set it up as a new phone and start from scratch.

Celbrites were far from perfect. They never handled things like SMS messages on iPhones very well at all.

For archiving your messages, I'd suggest PhoneView if you have a Mac. I've found it to be highly reliable. No, it doesn't enable you to put the messages back on the new phone but it archives them to either pdf or text files that are easily readable. In fact, they're much more convenient for accessing older messages.

Transfer your photos to your computer using whatever method you prefer.

I agree that your icloud account is corrupted. You can probably use a computer to transfer data, but that might not work depending on a new icloud account and your computer. You could also try to get everything uploaded to a google drive account and move everything over to your new phone, you could probably use onedrive if you prefer that better. The last way to transfer I know of would to find a mobile phone hard drive to put your stuff on. I hope you can use this to fix your problem.

Also - using iCloud is almost completely necessary, unless you want to weave around and backup to Amazon, Google, Microsoft (which is actually becoming an option), etc.

But if you're frozen out of the Apple iCloud ecosystem - there could be a bigger reason that you're not disclosing here - then it's going to be super difficult to keep everything in sync.

This is why Apple has the walled garden that they do.

Are you sure the bug/issue isn't in your iTunes or another app on your phone or computer(s)?

If it is, that could be why it keeps getting transferred with each upgrade/update on your devices. A corrupted file somewhere in there could be the cause. Perhaps, someone may have snuck something on to one of your devices that you keep transferring unwittingly?

I've had corruption issues happen over the years. Lost data, photos, music. It's so frustrating it makes one want to scream, cry, tear out hair (if we have any), throw stuff even, though I've never intentionally thrown a phone. I usually ball up my fists, then pound my desktop, then end up shaking my head, especially if I hadn't backed up everything beforehand (I've learned that lesson twice now). I finally broke down and bought iCloud storage to avoid this problem again. And, I backup my devices nightly too.

Whatever. Good luck.