Restore from backup from older iOS

Yes. Backup to iCloud or iTunes. Restore the SE from that backup.

It's only a problem going the other way, i.e. trying to restore a phone on older firmware from a newer backup.

 

I personally prefer to backup to iTunes if I'm sure I'm going to be doing a restore. And make sure to do an encrypted backup, if you want passwords restored. An unencrypted backup won't restore any passwords, which can be quite annoying.

 

Totally agree. That's my preference as well.

 

I'm having a HECK of a time restoring an iphone 5 (on 10.2) to a new SE iphone on 10.2.1. I make a backup of the iphone 5, successfully, then I try and restore to the new iphone SE and it says cannot restore, either corrupt or incompatible. Anyone know what that could be?

I was wondering if there was some security control, in that the iphone 5 only had a four digit pin and the new SE on 10.x requires a six digit pin.

Trying to do this through itunes which has historically been quite reliable for me.

 

Don't think it has anything to do with passcodes. I will say that I'm not sure what is happening to others but I was never required to enter a 6-digit passcode for my iPhone 5 when updating it to iOS 10.3.

But on to your problem…are you fully updated in iTunes? That may be the problem. Even if iTunes tells you it's updated, you should check. The latest version is iTunes 12.6 on both Windows and Mac.

Have a coworker who was having all sorts of issues because iTunes was telling her she was fully updated and she wasn't. If you have to, download directly from Apple's site.

 

There shouldn't be a requirement for a 6-digit PIN--it might be the one that is presented as the default option, but you should be able to select another option, like a 4-digit PIN, alphanumeric password, or no PIN at all even (all of this assumes there isn't some profile or something similar on the phone that might restrict what options are offered).

 

I checked itunes it was .1 version old, so updated it, but it's certainly one which should have been able to handle the SE.. I updated the SE now to 10.3.1 so we'll see how that works. Next I guess I'll try to backup to icloud and see if that works at all.