Clean start for my 6S, but want to keep Health and message history

[Darmok N Jalad]

So I’ve been bouncing between iPhone models for a few months to try different sizes, and I finally decided to land on a 6S. On each transition, I just backed up the current phone and then restored the new phone from the backup. From what I gather, this can eventually lead to random problems. I don’t know if it’s mainly due to iOS11, but I’m having issues where the phone occasionally freezes for 5-10 seconds and then goes back to normal.

Long story short, I’m considering a reset and then not restoring from backup to give my phone a clean start. However, I’d really like to carry over my Activity/Health data from my AW, and to a lesser extent, keep my message history. From my searches, I can’t tell if this is possible. Anyone have any experience doing this?

Sorry if this was asked and answered before. Searching the forums produces a lot of random results that didn’t seem to apply. Thanks for any help you can provide!

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Well, I did a reset. From what I could tell, so long as I unpaired my AW before the reset, a backup of the activity data is made. I couldn’t find anything for restoring messages, but I wasn’t as concerned since those are at least still on my Mac if I needed them for reference.

After resetting the iPhone. I set it up as a new device. Once I was up and running I re-paired the AW. It never prompted me to restore it from a backup like I thought it would, but fortunately my Activity history returned after it was done pairing. I did have to configure my watch faces again, but that wasn’t that bad. Messages are gone, but like I said, I could live with that.