Can I ‘Mirror backup’ my iPhone via iCloud Before Replacing it With a New One?

[iMore Question]

Hi there,
I’m having trouble with my touch screen on my iPhone 6 Plus after nearly four years of ownership. After some research, it looks like it might be the ‘touch disease’. Nevertheless, I am heading to Apple today to see if I can get it replaced or even upgrade to a 6S Plus. If I backup to iCloud, then go and get a new iPhone, will iCloud restore absolutely everything as if I haven’t lost anything? i.e. app data, app positions/folders on the screen, settings etc.
If not, will an iTunes backup and restore be more thorough?
Thanks for any insight!

 

[Tartarus]

Hi there,
I’m having trouble with my touch screen on my iPhone 6 Plus after nearly four years of ownership. After some research, it looks like it might be the ‘touch disease’. Nevertheless, I am heading to Apple today to see if I can get it replaced or even upgrade to a 6S Plus. If I backup to iCloud, then go and get a new iPhone, will iCloud restore absolutely everything as if I haven’t lost anything? i.e. app data, app positions/folders on the screen, settings etc.
If not, will an iTunes backup and restore be more thorough?
Thanks for any insight!

My iPhone 7 Plus got replaced a while back and I restored from iCloud without losing any data and app positions/folders.

If you want 100% safety, perform an encrypted backup through iTunes.

 

[p3t3rPan]

Plus one on encrypted.
It’s a breeze

 

[Joel_Zimmerman]

Thanks for the tips! But I literally just tried both. A few hours ago, I tried iCloud backup. It showed 4 hours remaining. I went to sleep for about an hour and looked st my phone. It seemed to have been completed. But it hadn’t. I didn’t touch the phone, nor did anyone else. So I tried an iTunes back up. It takes about 1.5 hours, but when it gets to 5 minutes remaining, I get:
“iTunes could not backup the iPhone because an error occurred while reading from or writing to the iPhone”.
I’ve checked out online remedies such as deleting backups, disabling auto-lock, updating to the latest iTunes version etc. All I can think that it might be is that I have a software update to complete for iOS. I will give that a go, then try the backups again. Argh!

 

[calebt]

Also make sure data cable is good, sometimes they will charge but not transfer data.