AppleInsider Staff
Before you reset your old iPhone, remember to unpair and back up your Apple Watch to ensure a seamless transition to the new iPhone 6s. Here's how to successfully transfer your Apple Watch from your old iPhone to a new one.
Before you can pair your Apple Watch with a new iPhone, you have to unpair it from the previous one. That's why it's important to remember to do this before you reset and wipe your old iPhone, to ensure you don't lose any data.
Backing up and unpairing the Apple Watch is simple: Open the Watch app on your iPhone, select Apple Watch under the "My Watch" menu, and then authorize the unpairing. This will take some time, as unpairing your Apple Watch will back up its contents to iCloud.
Once the Apple Watch had been unpaired, you can go through the pairing process on your new iPhone 6s to connect it to the device. From here, select the most recent iCloud backup of your Apple Watch to restore the device.
If you forget to unpair your Apple Watch before you erase your old iPhone, you're not completely out of luck — Â Apple allows you to restore your Apple Watch from a backup as long as you also restore your new iPhone from a backup. This is possible because the backups are also stored locally to the iPhone.
Apple Watch backups do not include credit or debit cards on Apple Pay, playlists synced to the device, the passcode lock, or Bluetooth pairings. The following, however, are backed up, according to Apple:
- App-specific data and settings, such as Maps, distance, and units
- General system settings, such as your watch face, known Wi-Fi networks, brightness, sound, and haptic settings
- Health and Fitness data, such as history, achievements,
- Workout and Activity calibration data from your Apple Watch, and user-entered data (To back up Health and Fitness data, you need to use iCloud or an encrypted iTunes backup.)
- Language
- Settings for Mail, Calendar, Stocks, and Weather
- Time Zone
Some data can also be lost in the pairing process — specifically, any steps or other Activity data logged since the last backup will obviously not be transferred to the Apple Watch once it is paired with a new iPhone.
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16 Comments
Thanks for this. Wish I had this when I got my now iPhone 6s . I did it the hard way and reset the watch.
Fascinating. This is not how it went for me. I can't remember if it was the phone or the watch that first alerted me that the watch wasn't paired with my new phone. I was then given a screen with instructions on how to restore the watch from the backup that seemed to have been brought over when I set up my new phone from the backup of my old phone. Yes, it did involve removing the old pairing and resetting the watch, but it was all fairly automatic after I started it.
On a slightly different topic, if you have health data, use encryption when backing up your old phone. Otherwise, the health data is not part of the backup.
When I switched phones two weeks ago, I opened the Watch app on the new phone to pair the Apple Watch. It told me to un-pair it first, which I did, and after pairing it to the new phone, it just restored from a backup, end of story.
I did not understand one thing: back up Apple Watch is done on the iPhone with which it is combined. When I cancel the pairing of Apple Watch, the backup is done on the iPhone. The question that I would like to know how this is going to be copied back up to iCloud? It's an automatic thing? It's 'a news on watchOS 2?
This is good advice: I was cautious and found this instruction within Apple so I did as advised above: worked seamlessly.