What to do if you want your old information on a new iPhone

Jun 3, 2010 18:41 GMT  ·  By

So you just bought yourself a latest generation iPhone and you now want to transfer information from your old iPhone to your newly bought iPhone. You can easily replace your current iPhone with a new one using the same carrier and you can also get your personal information from one to the other by backing up your old iPhone and restoring the backup onto the recently purchased device.

Why would you want to get the information stored on your old device to the new one? Some of the advantages of going through all this trouble are obvious (getting all your photos, notes, e-mails and SMSs onto the other device), while others will come up to you while starting to use the new iPhone (having the same personal settings).

This procedure will allow you to quickly get all your email accounts, SMS messages, photos, notes, and all other personal settings to the new iPhone in a few easy-to-follow steps that Apple has also covered in an article on its support website.

The steps you must go through are:

1. First of all, before starting to do anything else, make sure you have the latest version of iTunes on your Mac and the latest OS on your iPhone. To do that go to Apple’s download website and download the latest version of iTunes and install it on your Mac.

2. See if your old iPhone has been backed up (if it hasn’t, go to Apple’s support website and follow the instructions available in the ‘About backups‘ article. After making sure you’ve backed up your old phone, sync it by connecting it to iTunes.

3. Now, connect the newly bought iPhone to iTunes (to the same computer used when backing up your old iPhone) and select the old iPhone’s backup file when prompted by iTunes to restore from a backup. If you are not be prompted by iTunes to select a backup to restore when connecting the new phone, restore iPhone OS on your new iPhone (following the procedure detailed by Apple here) using iTunes and try this step again. If the iTunes progress bar will pause during the process of restoring your old iPhone’s backup, you will have to give it additional time for the upgrade to complete.

4. Your new iPhone will restart immediately after iTunes finishes restoring the old iPhone’s backup and you will have to select it, when your new iPhone appears again in the iTunes window. After selecting the iPhone, you will have to go through the tabs to change or verify all the items you want to sync to the new iPhone. When finished, click on the Apply button to sync your new iPhone with iTunes.

Now, your new iPhone should contain all the information you need from the old one. All that remains to be done is to give it a quick check to see if everything you selected to be synced to the new device is available. If not, you will have to restore iPhone OS on your new iPhone (follow the instructions available here) and go through the above steps again, starting with step 3.

If you have any questions regarding the transfer of your information from an old iPhone to a new one, leave us a note in the comments. Also, if you have other tips regarding this procedure, share your knowledge with us and the other readers in the comment section below.