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iPhone 13 Pro Transfer data directly from old phone in “Quick Start” takes forever

haruhiko

haruhiko

macrumors 604
Original poster
Sep 29, 2009
6,705
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Just got my 13 Pro from the Apple Store near my office. I tried to set it up using direct transfer from my old iPhone but the screen said it’s going to take 8 hours with the progress bar not really moving. I had to give up and will do the transfer again at home.

Isn’t it supposed to be a direct iPhone to iPhone transfer like AirDrop? Or does it somehow use my company’s super slow WiFi network?

Thanks.
 
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Doesn’t take 8 hours. Depending on how many songs and photos you have it could take 2-3 hours
 
bushman4 said:
Doesn’t take 8 hours. Depending on how many songs and photos you have it could take 2-3 hours
Click to expand...
The screen told me it’s taking 8 hours and after nearly an hour it’s still at 8 hours 🤦🏻😓🥲 so I had to give up. I thought the connection was direct so I could do it at work despite the crappy office WiFi here…
 
Quick Start relies on both Bluetooth and WiFi. It depends on the size of your content. It should be faster on your own WiFi about an average of 30 minutes unless you have a a lot of contents. You can also use wired if you have the dongle lightning to usb camera and connect another lightning to the other end for faster transfer
 
You (or anyone) will be up and running within 30 min. Then it will just take a while to download all of your apps and icloud data.
 
This was taking ages for me as well... at least 2 hours and it was still sitting around 70%. Definitely irregular, it has never taken this long before and I don't even have all that much on my phone. I decided to cancel and restore from a backup on my Mac, and that has gone a lot quicker.
 
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Mine took 2 hours, turns out I had 300GB of photos on my iPhone XS Max which is why it took so long
 
raab said:
Mine took 2 hours, turns out I had 300GB of photos on my iPhone XS Max which is why it took so long
Click to expand...
That's about how much I have in photos, and almost 500GB full on my iPhone 12 Pro Max now.

Based on what you said, I think I'll try to setup my 1TB iPhone 13 Pro Max via
restore from Finder over the lightning cable speed.

Would doing the restore over lightning cable to the iPhone 13 move over my login credentials like a device to device air transfer does (re: Gruber's quote?)
 
I wasn't aware I had that many photos in my storage as I had iCloud photos with optimise storage on my XS Max

I did turn it off briefly ages ago, which made it download photos, but enabled it an hour or so later so I guess it never cleared out the old photos

Not sure if doing it the cable way will shift all logins, my google logins didn't make it and neither did any of my MS Authenticator logins otherwise mostly everything else survived the phone to phone transfer

Worst case scenario is you have to do the phone to phone transfer again as your old phone will still be there to restore from
 
It takes 9 hours now at home lol. I guess I should give up and just do the iCloud restore. At least I can use my old phone.

My old iPhone has about 200GB of data in it.

To compare, (I also bought the new iPad mini today) my old iPad mini which has only 25-30GB of data, the status turned from about 10 hours to 19 minutes in a few minutes. I guess not even the iPhone knows how long does it take to transfer. It may be 9 hours, or maybe 3-4 hours, who knows. But I can’t use my old iPhone during the process of the transfer.

Ok ok.. I’m trying to refresh my iCloud backup of my old iPhone - the status doesn’t move either. So going the iCloud way doesn’t work too. My only choice will be patiently waiting for the transfer to complete.
 
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So Device-to-Device is recommended if I want my iPhone 13 Pro Max restored the exact way my iPhone 11 Pro is?
 
When you use this method (phone to phone) does it also move your apple watch over to the new phone automatically?
 
I'm worried it will take forever to do this with my 300-400 GB. I do have fast routers though, is it easy to cancel after it gives you the time estimate?
 
Just wait on it - I decided to do the iCloud restore from home and iCloud is completely down for backups. Just keeps erroring out with some nonsense message.
 
I don't have that much data on my 12 mini and it's been over three hours to do a device to device transfer. This is having previously deleted every photo and video on the phone and emptied the recently deleted album. It takes four or five minutes to do the initial transfer then reboots the new phone, which is usable at that point, but the old phone just gets stuck at 'Time remaining: 1 minute' or 'Time remaining: estimating..." for hours and there is no sign of progress and you cannot do anything with the phone, it's just stuck on that transfer screen. I recall similar things happening in years past, it's awful that no improvements have been made to this process. Judging from battery consumption, neither phone is actually doing anything and the storage currently in use in the new phone is not going up as this long wait continues.
 
no0nefamous said:
Is there any difference or benefit between this method bs restoring one of your backups?
Click to expand...
Mine took about 45 minutes with some downloads pending after that. The only real problem I have is my app library. The vast majority of my apps got dumped into an "Other" bucket as opposed to all of the different ones that were on my 12 pro max. buckets like Games, or Food & shopping, Health... are not there. This is where you really hate that Apple chose not to allow users to "self organize" the App Library..

Anyone else have this issue?
 
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