I received my iPhone 16 Pro yesterday, migrated everything over just fine … except Arc. All of my data is gone and my timeline has started anew. How do I get all of my historical data back?
Thanks!
Hi @gmartin200!
To get it back you will need to restore from Arc’s iCloud Drive backups, assuming you had those turned on. Do you have the “Arc App/Backups” or “Arc App/Previous Backups” folders in your iCloud Drive?
If not, you will need to turn on Arc’s iCloud Drive backups on the old phone, wait for a backup to complete, then do the restore on the new phone.
The reason this has happened is because iOS allows apps to be reinstalled on the new phone before it has finished restoring that app’s data from the iCloud backup. If the app is launched without its data, it starts up as though it’s a fresh install, with no data!
Arc’s database is exceptionally large, which means it takes quite a while to restore from iOS’s iCloud backups, making this problem more of a risk than for other apps.
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Thank you Matt!
I do have iCloud Drive backups turned on … on my old phone (btw, it seems to have defaulted to off on my new phone), and do have the “Arc App/Backups” folder in iCloud.
What is the exact process to restore this data? When I do Settings > Backup, Import & Export, then Open File Importer, there are 4000+ Timeline Item Files listed, do I hit Import All? Btw, as I quickly scan through these json files, I don’t see anything from 2024.
Thanks!
Phew! Glad you’ve got those files!
When Arc did a fresh install (believing you had no previous data. sigh) it should have found the Backups folder and copied it into the Import folder … uh, I’ll check the code now to make sure I’m understanding the flow correctly.
Ok, if it’s a fresh install it renames “Backups” to “Previous Backups” with some random characters on the end to avoid it clashing with any other previous backup folders.
Then it should’ve offered you a pink bar at the top of the timeline view, to start the managed restore. If you chose that, it would copy that Previous Backups folder into the Import folder.
Once it’s in the Import folder, the managed restore process would start importing those files. That “managed restore” is essentially identical to the “File Importer” you get from the Backup, Import & Export view. It just taps the buttons for you, so that you don’t have to touch anything yourself.
I find it more assuring to do it from the File Importer view, and sounds like you’ve got that far anyway! So here’s the steps to take:
- Tap “Import All” for the Sample Files
- Tap “Import All” for the Notes Files
- Tap “Import All” for the Day Summary Files
That’s all that the managed restore does - it’s just a different UI on top of the File Importer.
If the first attempt fails in some way, then I recommend not tapping Import All for the Sample Files, but instead tapping them week by week, or a few weeks at a time, in date order from the newest to the oldest. That way you can go to check the timeline view after each import chunk, to make sure things have restored correctly or as you expect.
Personally I always do it the tap tap tap way, a few weeks at a time, just so I can keep an eye on things as they’re happening. Plus iOS doesn’t like it when you do very large chunks of work all at once, so when “Import All” is done iOS tends to get angry eventually and terminate the app.
If iOS does terminate the app (and it almost certainly will - such is life on smartphones!) then it’s perfectly fine to go back in to File Importer and pick up where you left off. If you tap a week that you’ve already imported, the importer will scan through it and realise it’s got nothing to do, and quickly move on - it won’t repeat any importing that it’s already done, so there’s no harm in tapping a week twice.
In terms of which files are the most important: that’s the sample files. That’s the heart of the data, and everything else flows from there. Importing the sample week files will automatically import the related Timeline Item Files and Place Files, as needed.
The Notes files are what they sound like - any notes you’ve added to items. Those will import in seconds - super easy.
The Day Summary files really only contain the information of which days you’ve tapped Favourite on. Those also will all import in seconds.
Btw, as I quickly scan through these json files, I don’t see anything from 2024.
Eek! I just noticed this part. That’s not a good sign 
But it might not be lost. It’s possible that at some stage you turned off and back on the iCloud Drive backups setting, which would also rename the Backups folder to Previous Backups, and start a fresh backup. So it’s possible that there’s another Previous Backups folder in there that you can also import from.
In that case, it’s probably best to import from the folder that contains the newest files first. Though either order is mostly fine. As long as all the Samples files get imported, you haven’t lost anything.
Let me know how you get on!
Oh, one more note: The backups don’t currently contain the “activity type models”, which are the machine learning models that assist with automatic classification of samples with activity types (eg walking, running, bus, taxi, etc).
That’s fine - those models get rebuilt later, during overnight scheduled housekeeping tasks. But it does mean that the restored data might initially look much more messy than you expect. Samples that hadn’t been explicitly confirmed will get reclassified with automatic type assignments, and with the fully fleshed out models not yet rebuilt, the classifiers will make dumb choices.
So you’ll see a bunch of restored timeline items with silly activity types. But that’s ok! You can either start cleaning them up again yourself, if you want them fixed immediately, or you can just wait until the models get rebuilt overnight (it might take a few nights), and then they’ll get reclassified back to more sensible types.
I’m going to start adding those models to the backups too eventually. That post-restore experience of “oh no, this is all a mess!” is not so fun. So having the models already there, doing their jobs properly, instead of having to wait for them to rebuild overnight, would be a better experience.
Thanks for your help Matt, I’m moving forward cautiously to ensure I don’t lose anything … it seems all of the data is there, Arc just doesn’t realize it yet.
Here’s what I had:
Matt,
Here’s an update … when I Open File Importer, it now seems to have the correct files that I moved into the Backups folder. So, based on your previous email, should I import all Sample and Day Summary Files? How about the Timeline Item and Place Files?
Thanks,
In your first screenshot the LocomotionSamples folder inside the Import folder only has 17 KB of files in it, which is pretty small!
Have a look at the contents of the LocomotionSamples folder in the Previous Backups folder. That’s likely to contain the ones you need. It should more than 100 MB in size.
The File Importer view is only seeing the files it finds in the Import folder. Specifically it’s looking for folders inside there that match the names “LocomotionSamples”, “TimelineItem”, etc, and then identifying the files in those. So what you need is all the sample files inside that “Import/LocomotionSamples” folder.
Remember to copy them, not move them. You always want to be working on a copy of your backups, not the original, so that you always have that original of the backups preserved, incase anything goes wrong.
Hi Matt
I have the same problem and I’m trying to reload the local data from my old phone after deleting the Arc app from the new phone by selecting backup it up to iCloud
However even on the old phone Arc asks me if I want to restore my data from my iCloud backup - presumably it is empty now (if uploaded from the new phone).
How can I make sure the existing local data is properly backed up to replace the (presumably) empty iCloud files? I have just manually toggled off and on the Backup feature from Arc. As of now it says ‘backup in progress’. I have more than 6 years of records.
Thanks
Alwin
Update: I found an intact backup bundle under a Previous Backups ADDD203C created 4 hours ago in iCloud Arc App with full data.
The Arc app in the new phone has also indicated that it is loading data and may take a few hours. I don’t know whether the data is from the backup (as there is nothing when I opened the File Importer) or from the iCloud backup system. Guess I have to wait it out?
The easiest way to check that the folder has all the data is to look in the LocomotionSamples folder. There should be a week file for every week that you have data for.
Those sample files are the heart of the database, so as long as that file is there, that week of data is safe! The other files in the backups can be auto regenerated if needed (though that can be a bit messy, and require a lot of cleanup to get things looking how you want again). But yeah, as long as those week files are there in the LocomotionSamples folder, you’re safe.
Make sure to always be working on a copy of the Previous Backups folder, so that you’ve got at least one copy of it safely stored away, not being touched.
Let me know how you get on!
The manually initiated backup was working until Wk19 of 2024, and I had no further files since.
The syncing of the new phone to the iCloud files did not get those data loaded back onto the Arc app in the new phone either. However I am hesitate to perform a manual export as the data under the LocomotionSample folder aren’t up to date
What could be the normal operating steps to sync the automatically backed up data in iCloud to the new device?
Correction and update:
After repeated instructions to back up the data ( the last one lasted 10 hours) each back up folder at different instances would only contain data of randomly picked weeks for 2018, 2019 etc with about 200+M each in size. Then the back up window would say it is finished. Upon my checking of the folder in iCloud, the app would revert back to say that the last backup was 17 months ago.
So I am stuck with manually backup all the data from the old phone. I know iCloud automatically maintains the Arc data somewhere up there as the memory show 6G of related storage but I can’t access them without re-initializing the setup process for a new iPhone - and not sure if I would get the complete dataset even if I do.
What could be done further?
Ok, let me see if I can work through what’s happened so far. It sounds like you probably have multiple “Previous Backups” folders, and probably also a “Backups”, which all combined probably contain all of your data, but none of them have the entirety of it.
Oh, while it comes to mind: Don’t turn on Arc’s iCloud Drive Backups setting on the new phone yet! You don’t want it trying to back up the data on the new phone yet, while it’s in a messy state. That will clash with the data that was backed up on the old phone, which is the data we want to protect.
Anyway, back on track. The reason there might be multiple Previous Backups folders is that each time the setting in Arc is turned and back on the Backups folder is renamed to Previous Backups, and a new fresh backup is started.
But that’s all fine - we can import from multiple folders. We can do them one by one, until all the data is back in on the new phone.
But before we do that, I see you have a “Data Gap” that’s 74 months long on the new phone! That’s going to be a problem for importing the old data. The old data might not properly import over the top of that gap. So the first step will be to delete Arc on the new phone and start again.
Oh, but before we do that … do you have Moves data in the Arc App folder too? If so, you must’ve previously imported that on the old phone, which will mean it’s already in the backups. It’ll simplify things if we’re not trying to import that again on the new phone, and we don’t need to anyway - it’ll already be in the backup data from the old phone. So let’s start by moving that moves_export.zip (and/or moves_export folder) out of the Arc App folder, so that Arc doesn’t keep trying to import it on the new phone.
Once you’ve got a fresh install of Arc on the new phone, with nothing imported yet, we’ll go into the File Importer in the Settings → Backup, Import & Export view, and start importing the “Sample files” from there, starting from newest date and working backwards in time in order. Don’t skip over any weeks, as that will create a gap in the timeline that the processing engine might try to heal over (which is possibly how that massive Data Gap appeared).
If the Previous Backups folder currently in the Import folder isn’t the one with the most recent weeks in it, switch it out for the one that does have the most recent weeks. Then once you’ve finished importing all of that, move it out and copy in the next most recent Previous Backups folder, working your way back through them like that until they’re all back in.