Is anyone else having problems restoring their iPhone backups?
I made a classic mistake on Friday night when I was sorting out the new iPhones for myself and my wife.
Two iPhone 6 devices arrived on Friday morning and then late into the evening I decided to get them setup.
I backed up my wife’s iPhone 5S and then my own iPhone 5S.
And then I promptly erased my wife’s iPhone 5S, ready for the phone to be recycled.
I fired up her new iPhone 6 and went through the restore process.
Everything was fine during the set-up process until the time came to perform the actual restore. That failed. I tried about 10 times.
The error I got was invariably the same:
Lost Network Connection
Your iPhone could not be restored because you are no longer connected to the Internet.
This, sadly, is blatantly not true, given I’ve got a highly reliable BT Infinity 2 connection here and the rest of my devices are all performing perfectly fine. I tried multiple hotspots. I even used my MacBook to masquerade as a private hotspot. Nada. Now and again I’d see a message on the phone saying “Two hours remaining” or “40 minutes remaining”, indicating the restore was working…
And then the same error message would appear again.
Eventually my wife went to bed. Without her phone. And that’s saying something. It’s almost unnatural to go to bed nowadays without your phone ‘working’.
I eventually decided to setup her iPhone 6 as a new device.
Which was a total flipping arse for her. And then for me, when my iPhone 6 wouldn’t restore my backups — it was suffering from exactly the same symptoms.
I reasoned that the error must be due to the sheer number of people hammering Apple’s iCloud servers on Friday. I used the same reason to explain the continual error messages across the weekend. Backup works fine. Restore seems to be flawed.
And now I’ve got a problem: Worry. I’m not accustomed to Apple stuff not working.
My worry is that when I lose my iPhone, the restore still won’t work.
What is the flipping point of paying for a 200gb iCloud account when the flipping thing doesn’t work?
I’ve been wondering whether to contact Apple and try and get some support. But I am not holding out much hope. I don’t know if I can be bothered.
It’s been seriously inconvenient to lose all the basic settings I thought I’d be able to restore in a few minutes automatically.
Have you come across a similar situation? Did your iPhone restore process work without a hitch? Any suggestions?
Both iPhone 6s are setup and working now — it did take me most of Saturday night to get my new 6 back into operational mode with all the various passwords and services setup again. So I don’t have an immediate need to restore — but I do want to know that when I need it, it will actually work!
Rather disappointing. If you’ve any suggestions, I’m keen to hear them!
