My iPhone was recently repaired and enough components were replaced that it was effectively a new phone and thus I restored from iCloud. Following this, I get a dialogue saying a restore folder was found, when I try to restore it tells me errors were found and when I try to view the error log, it’s empty. I think I did a successful Arc restoration following the iCloud restoration but it seems to be stuck on these errors as the message and dialogue doesn’t go away. strong text
Hmm. “0 of 1095” is a quite bad result.
That’s the automatic / managed restore flow. Which if it works, is great. But if it doesn’t work, there’s the manual process that you can get to from the Settings tab → Backup, Import & Export → Open File Importer.
That view will show you the files it finds in the Import folder on iCloud Drive. If you don’t see the files in there, you can copy them in (note copy, not move - you always want to work with copies, so you don’t lose the originals). That would mean copying the “Previous Backups” folder into the “Import” folder.
From there, you can tap “Import All” on the “Sample Files”. Which is exactly what the auto/managed restore process does - it’s just a different UI on top of the same system.
You can also try tapping one file at a time, starting from most recent and moving backwards as they succeed. That way you can check that each week imports successfully before moving on to the next. Or do them in batches of 2-4, depending on how quickly you want to get through it versus status checking along the way.
Only the Sample Files need to be imported. The TimelineItem files and Place files get auto imported as dependents of the Sample files.
Oh the Notes files also need to be imported, to not lose those. And the Day Summary files, is you ever use the “Favourite day” feature. Those last two aren’t technically dependent / connected to the timeline data, so they’re independent imports. The Samples → TimelineItems → Places are all the core timeline data.
Oh I forgot the most important detail! The files need to be synced to the phone first.
Go into the Files app, find the Previous Backups folder or Import folder, long press on them, and select “Download now” and probably also “Keep downloaded”.
If the files aren’t synced to the phone yet, Arc will request that iOS syncs them. But it’s a slow process, and Arc ends up having to wait a long time, while also trying to import. It’s much more clunky and error prone that way. Better to get the Files app to do it all first, before starting the import/restore.