Pretty much every spring Apple releases a new version of the iPhone and that means it’s time for everyone to decide if they can spare enough money for the latest model. If you have stuck with Apple over the years, you’ve probably upgraded your phone at least 2 or 3 times, even with those two year contracts.
When you get a new iPhone, the obvious task is to transfer all your data from your old phone to your new phone. In order to do this, you have to backup one phone and restore the backup on the second phone. You can do this in one of two ways in iOS: local backups or via iCloud.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can switch between two iPhones using the local backup method and via iCloud. Before we get started, though, I should mention some of the caveats and pitfalls that can occur along the way.
iOS Version Requirements
Most of the time, you’ll be restoring a backup from an older iPhone running an older version or the same version of iOS as your new phone and this will cause absolutely no problems. When you perform a restore, the version of iOS on the device has to be the same or newer than the version in the backup.
For example, if you have an iPhone 5S running iOS 8 and you are restoring that backup to an iPhone 6S running iOS 9, everything will work fine. However, if you updated your iPhone 5S to iOS 9.2.1, created a backup and then tried to restore it on your iPhone 6S running iOS 9.1, it won’t work!
The fix is relatively easy, though. In cases like that, just update your phone to a version that is higher than the version in the backup and you’ll be fine.
Transferring Passwords
The second major issue, at least for me, is getting all my passwords transferred over to my new device. It’s pretty easy to get all your apps, photos, messages, etc. transferred, but it’s a real pain to have to re-enter all your app passwords, Wi-Fi passwords, and website passwords.
There are two ways you can transfer your passwords to another iPhone: by encrypting the local backup or by turning on iCloud KeyChain. As I mention both methods below, I’ll point out how to activate these two features, which will save you a lot of tedious typing after a restore.
How to Switch or Transfer Data to a New iPhone
