Backup Apple Watch

Hey has anyone found a way to force the phone to backup your Watch? (aside from the nuclear option of ‘Unpaired’, which wipes the watch, but does not always create a backup first).

For each time Ive received and installed a new watch, the backup it offers up to install from is old, 6-month old sometimes. Hence, clearly the watch is NOT being back regularly, and the restored new watch has lots of old settings, faces etc…meaning I have to go through and set it up again.

I found where the backups are stored on the phone, and sure enough the not recent one is from 2021!

It annoys me Apple seemingly won’t let us back it up, but clearly has no process to do so regularly either.

Ahhh, I had this issue recently and know the answer! (and it sucks).

What’s happening is that your watch IS backing up as it should, the problem is the new watch is running an older version of WatchOS compared to your latest backup so when you try to pair it, the phone only offers the latest backup for the same version of WatchOS that it is running.

The solution is to start the watch up, pair it as a new watch without restoring the backup, update the watch, un-pair it… then re-pair it and this time take the latest backup from your old watch.

Why can’t it just say “gee, the latest backup is too new for your watch, would you like to update first?”

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Great tip! Thanks!

Yes, great explanation. Thanks.

Seriously Apple, just let us back the bloody thing up!

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Yes, a manual backup button would be awesome… but the magical nature of iCloud means you just sort of have to wait and hope. That said, today’s backup, last weeks?? Last month? Probably doesn’t matter too much anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

It would be great if you could push a manual backup to the phone then restore directly from that and be done. But really, that on the fly upgrade bit really needs to be implemented first.