Yeah, I hate how Apple runs things. We are all tied to the iCloud whether we like it or not. I just got a new phone and have run into numerous issues as well.
I refused to put in any credit card information and so far everything is still working OK. So you don’t have to. But you do have to have an iCloud account and an Apple ID. Once you set those up, you don’t have to use them again but make sure you save the information somewhere.
As others have said, rebooting is the first thing to try. If that doesn’t work, I am out of options :-) I think I have gotten my phone to work primarily by accident.
I have finally branched out into using the iCloud for a back up. It is ridiculously easy! I locked myself out of my iTunes account by putting in a password that I couldn’t remember. That is one place where there is absolutely no workaround for not remembering the password. I tried everything that googling brought up. Nothing worked, it is intentionally extremely secure :-(. So I was forced into trying the iCloud back up. Now I am hooked. It does it automatically and I don’t even have to be involved.
When I got my new phone, I didn’t put a password in iTunes for the back up. But I hardly ever use it because the iCloud back up is lovely.
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But I do have a question for all you technical people out there -
I noticed my iCloud back up on my iPhone 6 is much much smaller than it was on my five. It was almost 2 1/2 GB on the five, and now it is about 400 MB. Same data. I don’t back up photos but I do just about everything else.
I’m not sure if there was a way to make sure the back up is complete, other than restoring my phone from it. I’m not willing to take that risks . Now when I Got the new phone and restored the backup from the cloud onto it, everything worked like a charm. It was all there and I didn’t even have to change anything. So that was a good test… But this much smaller size has me concerned. Are they doing some kind of file compression or something?
PS. Just wanted to add my husband had an android phone and did a Google back up. When something happened and he needed to do a restore it didn’t have all his data. Actually he did it twice. Once everything was there and the second time it wasn’t. So 50 percent success rate isn’t all that great.
So I do like with Apple that you get two choices, the iCloud and iTunes. Maybe one or the other will be correct.
But if anybody knows any surefire ways to back up these phone, whether apple or android, Please let me know. It might influence what kind we get next time.