Is there a way to selectively restore an iPhone?

[Faize]

My backups (and presumably my phones as well) have multiple pieces of content that are stuck in a state of limbo - I delete them, but they come back when I restore my phone or upgrade to a new phone, I delete them again, they come back years later on the next restore/upgrade, ad infinitum. Some of this content dates all the way back to 2017.

I'd love to get rid of this accumulated junk for good, but Apple's all or nothing approach to backing up and restoring is making that difficult...

 

[FreakinEurekan]

It's all or nothing.

You CAN start over "Blank" though, and re-sync a lot of info from iCloud and other cloud accounts, depending on where your data is. I did a "Clean slate" restore a few months ago trying to resolve an issue (to make a long story short - it didn't work, but the problem was resolved with an iOS update later) and it wasn't as bad as I feared. All my messages, calendars, reminders, photos came back from iCloud and all my email from Gmail. Basically all I had to do "Manually" was reinstall the apps I wanted, which gave me a chance to prune that.