iPhone migration: restore from backup or setup from scratch?

In moving to my fifth iPhone I decided it was time to try a fresh install instead of transferring state from my previous one. Apple’s transfer process has always worked works seamlessly but that Star Trek-like transportation of your old phone to the new makes the new one seem, well a little less new somehow. Previously I would have feared losing something small but vital by not using the transfer process but with so much now synchronised between devices by iCloud, it seemed that the most painful and important items were covered. My willingness to experiment was also mitigated by the knowledge that if it all went wrong I could still re-install the new phone from my old backup.

Without the need to wait for a gigabyte of data to be transferred to the new phone, I was up and running very quickly and enjoyed seeing what differences there are between an out-of-the box configuration and my own. With the exception of turning off the sound and vibration notifications for new email, I have customised very little to start with: I want to see if there are any settings or features I have previously overlooked because of some decision I made 7 years ago. Working through my list of apps and choosing to only reinstall those I know I have used recently was also enlightening—there were applications I had forgotten existed buried in never-opened folders, and including some that now crash on startup. I noticed others that are no longer being updated but the developers have instead issued a whole new app instead. I learned that the telltale sign for this is when you tap on the application in your “purchased” list and it fails to display anything about it.

Having chosen which apps would survive the migration and downloaded them all, the main pain point was having to re-authenticate in all of them. The reduced number of apps kept this manageable and I would guess about 50% enabled the use of iCloud Keychain which made it a two-tap process. Given the tedious and error prone nature of typing in a complex password onto a phone keyboard I am shocked that the other 50% do not enable this. Those apps which forced me to lookup and retype my password are certainly strong candidates for deletion if there is an alternative. 1

By not restoring from backup, any applications that store state locally and not in the cloud would lose their data. I was a little worried about my Angry Birds progress but then realised I had not played the game in a very long time anyway, and so far I have discovered only one application which stores data I would like to keep. It is a free app and its paid for version supports data export, which seems fair enough. WhatsApp messages were restored from its own iCloud backup (which it performs nightly) but I did lose my SMS and iMessage history (going back to 2008). Recent iMessages are on my mac anyway and after reviewing the older messages they were all very temporally contextual—“I am here / outside, where are you?”—type stuff. It is noticeable how much longer messages have become recently, perhaps an inevitable consequence of removing the 160 character limit of SMS.

In conclusion, unless you have apps or games that depend on local data, setting up from scratch was not at all painful and it felt really good to have a spring clean. Deleting something always requires metal energy to assess its value, or downside of its loss, and with storage so cheap it is rarely worth the effort. Consequently we accumulate bits and bytes rather too easily, and sometimes a platform migration is a good moment to assess what is no longer required, and start afresh.

  1. Anecdotally, many of those which failed to implement keychain were companion apps from established non-digital companies, for example, airlines and hotel chains. Developers competing for users on the strength of their app alone were far more likely to have implemented it.[]