Confused by iTunes or iCloud backup

[jdsmitty10]

Hello. Probably a dumb question but my wife's iPhone got bricked and it wasn't backed up to iTunes since October. It had iCloud back up on for things like contacts/notes etc. Her replacement phone arrived today. When asked to restore from either iCloud or iTunes I chose iTunes figuring it had a lot of the other data like songs and photos. Is there a way to get the backup from iCloud "added" since there were changes to things like contacts and stuff since the iTunes back up?? Am I thinking correctly that there are technically two backups of things like contacts etc?
Thanks for your help

 

[Shirasaki]

If your iTunes backup has some ages comparing with iCloud backup, then there might be differences in your contacts etc. .

Normally, iCloud backup happens automatically when your device is connected to Wifi, plugged and locked. You could check when your last backup happened by plugging your previous device into computers with iTunes installed or just a Mac.

But since your device is replaced, the only way I know to check is to see the date info when letting you to choose to restore from backup. If you worry about it, erase your device after making a full backup (be sure to archive previous old backup FIRST), and when iTunes (when you connect your device to computer) or iPhone (when your device is not connected to computer) prompts you to restore from backup, see the date.

 

[jdsmitty10]

Well after restoring using iTunes her newer contacts are still there so not sure how that works but the last back up date was 9/16/16 or something and she has had new contacts added since then for sure.

 

[Mlrollin91]

iCloud Contacts/Calendar/Bookmark syncing is different than backups. Logging into your iCloud device will restore all of those that I just listed automatically.

Things that will be missing between September 2016 and now would be photos, app data, messages, health data and so on. If any of this information is needed, and you can verify that the iCloud backup is still present (hasn't been overwritten) you can restore the device and set it up again but this time select restore from iCloud. If iCloud backup was turned on, it makes a nightly backup. The probably is making sure the most recent backup wasn't overwritten by the new device, then all the data would be lost permanently.

 

[cswifx]

If your device has been syncing all your data to iCloud (meaning you didn't disable any of the iCloud backups and left everything on), you should restore from iCloud. This ensures that all your recent data from the most recent nightly/manual backup is restored, instead of the outdated iTunes backup.
It's even better if you use iCloud Photos Library and iCloud Music Library, because that means there's practically nothing else left to manually transfer.