Strike One
During an international trip last spring I cracked the screen on my iPhone 11 Pro. The screen had already been replaced once. And the replacement battery was also down to about 70% of its original capacity.
Those items, combined with a desire to access the 5G cellphone network and to have satellite based SOS messaging when in areas with no cellphone coverage lead me to replace the phone with a iPhone 16 Pro.
The Apple website indicated that my old phone had no trade in value so I just purchased a new phone and brought it home to transfer things from the old to new by myself.
I have never taken my iCloud account to a paid level and do not have enough storage available on it to back up my phone.
Not much changes from day to day on my iPhone so I back it up to my laptop monthly. Anything important, typically photos, I transfer to my laptop immediately. The laptop is backed up hourly to my NAS with its RAID based storage. In addition, email and calendars are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) running my private NextCloud instance with continuous backups made by the provider.
In theory, the transfer of information from my old phone to the new would be pretty easy: Assure I have a current backup of the phone to the laptop. Then restore the phone backup to the new phone from the laptop.
And that almost worked.
It turns out that the “full and encrypted” backup of the iPhone does not, in fact, back up the actual apps on the phone. It only seems to back up the data and a list of apps that are on the phone. The newly “restored” phone needs to download the actual apps from the App Store.
To download apps from the App Store you need to log into your Apple Account. And, try as I might, I was unable to successfully type in the 64 random character password. Normally I simply copy from my KeePass app and paste. But to do that I needed the KeePass app to be on the phone for which I needed the App Store to work. For that I needed to be logged in to the Apple account. For that I needed the KeePass app. . . Obviously, I can’t get there from here.
I futzed about trying different ways of securely passing the Apple account password to the new phone from my laptop but in each case ran into an issue, mostly because the device was not logged into the Apple account.
Eventually, after several hours, I gave up and used my laptop to change my Apple account password to something I could type.
It was definitely not the “it just works” experience that Apple used to strive for. Our use of KeePass predates our use of iPhones and I see no reason to change. But using a third party password app does lead to circular dependency issues when upgrading iPhones.
I had most things on the new phone setup with the one remaining item being the Signal message history data. Signal, in their infinite wisdom, do not trust Apple’s backup system even if you have Advanced Data Protection enabled on iCloud or are making local encrypted backups like I do.
At that time the only way to transfer your Signal data on iOS was directly from phone to phone. A bit fiddly but it once I figured it out it went pretty smoothly. I vaguely recall it taking about half an hour.
Strike Two
On our next foreign trip two things became apparent: My spouse’s iPhone 11 Pro was not getting coverage with its travel eSIM that I was getting on my iPhone 16 Pro. Mine worked perfectly while their’s did not. Their’s didn’t even get 4G LTE where mine did. They were far better off tethering to my phone. The second thing was that the camera system on the 16 Pro is much better than on the 11 Pro especially in low light conditions. Since they are the photographer in the family this is not ideal.
After a bit of arm twisting, they succumbed to my push to replace their phone with the newly released 17 Pro.
I found that they had not been doing periodic backups of their phone. And, in fact, their older laptop seemed unable to perform a back up. That is something I need to look into.
But that should be no big deal: Their old phone, other than a worn out battery, was in good shape and we can transfer the data directly from phone to phone.
And we might as well have Apple do it saving me some time and hassle at home. What could go wrong?
So on a recent afternoon we trek on over the the local Apple Store and buy a new iPhone 17 Pro. The old 11 Pro was in good enough condition to be acceptable for trade in with some value. Wonderful!
The salesman starts the phone-to-phone transfer using a cable and it says it will take a couple of hours. No problem, we have other errands to run and we can have supper somewhere too. We get back to the store that evening and the main transfer is done. But, of course, the Signal database is not transferred.
We need to get the actual Signal app on the new phone by logging in to the Apple account. Fortunately, this time we know that we will need to type the Apple account password so we are prepared and we quickly have KeePass up an running so can get other accounts setup.
Recently Signal put out a beta for iPhone for doing a cloud back up and restore using a cloud set up by Signal. But, in theory, the direct phone to phone setup I used last spring should still work and not incur the cost of another subscription. We start the phone to phone back up and it says it will take a lot of hours. Not too big a problem, we can come back in the morning.
The next morning we are back at the Apple Store and we find the Signal data transfer has failed. We try starting it again and it says some huge number of hours is needed. What the??? Off to home again with the expectation we can call the store to see when the transfer is complete.
One of the issues is that the store can call you when the work is done. But the number they can call is the cellphone number for the phone they have in their possession. Very hard for you to answer that phone when they have it.
There is a local phone number listed for the local Apple Store. But it does not connect to the Apple Store, it connects to an AI driven “helper”. Eventually if you scream at it long enough that you want to check status of a phone to phone transfer at the local store it transfers you to a second level AI driven “helper”. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, if you are lucky, you get to a person who can actually call the store and ask the people there what the status is.
But they don’t really know the status because both phones have screen locked and they don’t have the PINs or correct faces for the face ID to unlock them.
So we are now on our forth visit to the Apple Store. When we get there we find the Signal transfer has failed again. In desperation, we set up the beta cloud backup. That takes about 30 seconds to upload to Signal’s cloud. Then we restore the back up to the new phone which again takes only a minute or so. WTF? A direct phone to phone copy totally fails several times and while failing claims to need many hours. Yet a backup and restore over the Internet takes less than a couple of minutes?
This strike is against Signal. A quick Internet search tells me that I am not the only one who has run in to problems with a iPhone to iPhone transfer of Signal data so I think Signal has broken the old transfer method when they implemented the cloud beta. And, I guess, Apple should get an “assist” strike on this with their AI driven phone “helper”.
Notably, in both cases, the transfer of the Visible phone service from the microSIM based old iPhones to the eSIM based new iPhones using the Visible App worked very well. Yay! Visible.
A Hit
I have been running Home Assistant on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 3 that was setup some years ago. For the last six or so months I have been getting warnings that support for 32 bit architecture is being dropped. Finally this month I got the no longer supported message on the monthly updates.
The spec sheet for the the Raspberry Pi 3 says it can support 64 bit operation so, in theory, I should be able to simply back it up, re-flash with a 64 bit version of the OS, and restore the Home Assistant backup.
To be safe, I did the restore to a different microSD card. But basically that is all that was needed. Simple, straight forward, quick, and it worked on the first try. Good job awards to Raspberry Pi Foundation and the folks behind Home Assistant. The Pi 3 is no longer recommended, superseded by newer versions, but it is sufficient for my use and it is nice to be able to keep it current.