iPhone 13 Pro Max iPhone transfer failed — not enough space?? How?

[DDustiNN]

I’m trying to set up my sister’s phone. She has an iPhone 12 Pro Max 512 GB, but has only used 60 GB. I’m trying to do the iPhone transfer to her new phone, which is an iPhone 13 Pro Max 256 GB. Yet it says it can’t complete because there’s not enough space. Uhh… what?? How does 60 GB not fit into 256 GB???

So now I’m doing the iCloud backup, which she’s never done, and it is taking hours just to do the initial backup 😡

 

[!!!]

So now I’m doing the iCloud backup, which she’s never done, and it is taking hours just to do the initial backup 😡

iTunes backup is much quicker than iCloud, even with the Lightning connector and its USB 2.0 speeds.

 

[now i see it]

I backed up an iPhone that had 30 GB of data on it to iCloud and it took 5 hours with a 5/50 internet connection. Took less than 5 minutes to backup to my Mac.

 

[DDustiNN]

I backed up an iPhone that had 30 GB of data on it to iCloud and it took 5 hours with a 5/50 internet connection. Took less than 5 minutes to backup to my Mac.

I am trying the iTunes backup via USB and it has been going for 2 hours so far… not even close to being done yet. No idea what is going on here!

 

[anson42]

I ran into a problem restoring music from backup. Turns out on my iPhone 12 Pro Max I was experimenting with lossless music and had changed my download setting to Lossless when previously it was just High Quality. You might guess what happens next....

When restoring from backup to my new iPhone 13 Pro Max, iOS decides to download all my previous music in Lossless format! Where I previously had over 50 GB of high quality music files on my iPhone, it was now trying to download many times that! So of course I ran out of space on the new phone.

I fixed this by first updating the Music download setting back to High Quality, then from the iPhone storage page deleted all the albums that downloaded with much higher fidelity. Easy to find those as the album sizes are pretty large. The restore continued but now it was downloading the high quality tracks I had before.

So, if on the Settings page you see that the restore process needs more storage, check the size of your music files and the music download setting.