I’m so paranoid about my backups, I have a multi-cloud solution in place to ensure I never lose any data, ever. After two WD Red drives fell at the same time in my X-RAID ReadyNAS, I vowed to never go physical again.

But what good is a backup if it is corrupted? Everyone should occasionally do a restore from backup just to make sure the process works, and yes, you have that file you made yesterday. My photos are stored on Amazon and Apple, my documents on Google and Apple, etc. Apple has been great except when it comes to iOS backups.

Moving to/from public and private betas is bound to cause some issues along the line. I can’t expect my iOS data to evolve perfectly with each release. And when I got the iPhone 11 Pro, my data was unusable. Knowing I would soon receive the phone, I moved to iOS 13.1.2 non-beta, but was unable to backup to iCloud. The size of the backup was around 9gb, so after days of frustration, I deleted the backup and tried to start from scratch. Didn’t help, backups were taking longer than the 12 hours I could leave my phone in any one place.

When I got the new phone, I tried the phone-to-phone sync which again took longer than my 12 hour threshold. After multiple failed attempts, I made a genius appointment and was sat down in a class for people having trouble with their new devices. Unbelievable. I bought the USB3 to lightening camera adapter and figured I’d sync the phones over the wire. Again, failure. The process would take hours to even begin, then would go for a couple hours, then get stuck at 1 hour remaining. It was now the weekend so I could leave my phone sitting around all day, but 4 hours on 1 hour remaining was too much.

I decided to start over and not use my backup. What was I going to lose? Well, besides my settings?

Turns out, not much. There are some small issues like address book photos disappearing, but I now have a tiny footprint and my phone feels clean for once.