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Other New Phone: Restore from backup or Setup as new phone?

How do you set up your new phone?

  • Total voters
    121
Not anymore! I used to always setup as new as otherwise it would cause issues! But since the iPhone X it hasn’t caused issues for me. It transfers info wirelessly and all I need to setup is applepay and log Into banks. Setting up the phone as new is a waste of time! Cleaning up unused apps is much easier, takes much less time and it’s not hard to adjust widgets and main screen.
 
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I usually put the new and old phones together to setup, but this year am thinking about seating up as a new phone. The only thing holding me back is that I know it’s going to take forever. But I think it may be worth it.
 
I’m going to migrate. There are simply too many privacy and security settings I’ve tweaked over the years to make it worthwhile. Only if the migration seems like it resulted in a borked system would I consider starting from scratch.

Besides, I suspect Apple is just transferring inert iCloud data and not the apps themselves. Even if your old phone had been compromised, I can’t think of anything in the migration process that would result in your new phone being compromised (which is quite different from how Microsoft used to migrate data.)
 
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I’ll either do phone to phone transfer or restore from iCloud backup. I’ve never had issues with either of these methods
 
I used to do the new phone route and not restore but over the past 3-4 phone models I've just done the restore as I'm getting lazier and I've had no issues with it. It's so nice to just wait awhile and then have my phone up and running again.
 
I always restore from backup because I get new iPhone ever 1-2 years. But this time I will set up new phone to get rid of useless and trash apps I’ll never use. I’m really excited to finally set up new home screens with the new interactive widgets in iOS 17
 
I've had every version of the iPhone and I've been restoring from backups, iTunes then iCloud, for around 15 years. Never had a problem.
 
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Going to try a new setup this year. My 12 Pro has been laggy lately, might just be apps but figured nice time to start new.

I also have a lot of apps collected that I do not want to manually go through and delete. Will force me to thing things through with page setups, focus' setc. Currently at 250+ apps.

My ONLY Concern is things not synced via iCloud. In the past I was worried about Health data but I believe that is covered now.

So In theory all important things will sync:
- Photos
- Passwords/Keychain
- Notes
- Messages
- Health
- Calendars
- Home Setup
- Contacts

All I will have to do is re-download apps and relogin.
🤞

EDIT: One Important thing to remember: Transfer device authentication of 2FA before gettign rid of old phone. Becomes much harder to restore those after the fact such as the Microsoft Autenticator.
 
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I’ve always done a transfer but this year I’m going with a fresh install just to get rid of some of the weird bugs I’ve been having.
 
My method is:
- Upgrade old phone to new OS
- Clean it up some if I care to shorten the backup / restore time
- Do a manual backup of old phone
- Restore to new phone.

I setup as new every once in a while, but not usually when I get a new phone. My free time to go through a fresh setup usually doesn't line up with iPhone releases ;). I tried to do the direct phone to phone migration once when that was new and it bombed out and never tried again.
 
I used to always setup as new due to jailbreaking. But nowadays I just do encrypted backup/restore. Haven't experience any issues so far.
 
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