How did this ever come about and how is it nothing has ever been done about it? iTunes entices you to turn on encrypted backups for your iPhone without any warning that there is NO way to recover your password if you forget it. Horrible but OK fine. Whatever. But how is it that there is NO way to just delete all your old backups and begin new backups without encryption? There is no way to ever turn encryption off without restoring factory settings to your iPhone. This has to be one of the biggest fails in Apple history.
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The information is available for anyone to see, you just have to look.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220
Aside from that, anytime you're password protecting something it's important to remember your password. It's not really anyone's fault but your own that you didn't do that.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220
Aside from that, anytime you're password protecting something it's important to remember your password. It's not really anyone's fault but your own that you didn't do that.
I agree that it is unfortunate that you can't turn off encryption if you don't know your password.
Have you considered using a password safe? I use this one:
https://pwsafe.org/
which is free, works on Windows and has an iPhone app.
http://keepass.info/ is another popular one. There are many others out there.
I have no idea what my iTunes encryption password is - but it's stored in my password safe, which is stored on Dropbox for safety. And I NEVER forget my password safe password, because I use it frequently.
You could just not forget your password or store your password in a safe place. Forgetting your password for encryption is on you, not Apple. That's the entire purpose of encryption.
Doesn't change the fact that there is no way to turn off encryption without the password. Even if you want to delete all your old backups and start fresh without encryption. Horrible design.
That's the point of encryption. It requires a password. So don't forget your password. If you use any other encryption software and forget the password, you've screwed yourself. This is not an Apple thing, it's an encryption thing.
You missed the point. A lot of other people have complained about the same thing. Ok, so I encrypted my backups on my computer with itunes and now I forgot the password and can't access them. Fine. Shame on me. But now there is no way to ever turn off encryption for future backups with the same phone unless I do a factory reset. That is an unnecessary design flaw.
You want encryption that isn't secured at all? Are you serious?
So you would WANT someone to be able to disable the encryption without knowing the password? This is like the whiners about Activation Lock.
Finally... it's YOUR mistake if you treat the phone as authoritative, not Apple's.
That's not a design flaw, that's information security.
A lot of people don't understand encryption then. it's not a design flaw. That's how it's meant to work. There's no problem here. Just don't forget your encryption password. It's as simple as that. This is like forgetting the combination to your safe and getting pissed at the company that makes the safe because you forgot your combination and can't get it in.
No, it's like giving someone a safe and saying if you forget the combination you are never allowed to buy another safe.
No it isn't, lol. You're being silly. You've created a problem in your mind that doesn't actually exist. The encryption works exactly as intended. Don't forget your password or keep it stored somewhere. Nobody here is going to agree with you because you're wrong.
I don't care about removing the encryption from the old backups, I want to be able to make NEW unencrypted backups.
Then don't forget your password.
And actually you can still restore from the encrypted backups using your unlock code for the phone instead of the password. But this still does not lead you to any way of removing the encryption or changing the password or settings.
The password is stored on the device so nobody can just go to another computer and start making backups and steal your data. I would recommend using the iCloud to create a backup, then restore the device and restore the iCloud backup afterwards. Then you can start making new iTunes backups......
It's annoying, but it's necessary. If someone had your phone and access to the machine you're running iTunes on, all they'd have to do is create a new unencrypted backup of your phone and they'd have access to all of your data. That would be a design flaw.
I haven't used iTunes in ages so you might want to research this first, but I think that if you uninstall/reinstall iTunes it will allow you to re-do your backup settings.
No it does not. Mine is off and was by default.
Can't you do a backup to iCloud and then reset the phone and restore from iCloud?