READ THIS: Before you restore your iPhone

I made a mistake.

And of course I didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late.

For a while, my iPhone 6 was acting weird- it said I had used up 11 GB of data, which, for a 16 GB/actually 11.86 GB phone was a lot. But when it came time to add up how much my apps were really taking up, it was like, 3 GB.  I even deleted my Facebook app trying to make enough room!

Eventually I resigned myself that I had to restore my phone. Which I know shouldn’t be a big deal, but freaks me out every time that something will go wrong and I’ll lose stuff.

And can you guess? That’s what happened.

So I backed up my phone onto iTunes and I restored my phone. It took awhile, but it worked well. I gained 9 GB of space! Woot woot! Problem solved!

Until.

I went to re-pair my watch (silly me, I hadn’t unpaired it before I restored my phone so I had to wipe my watch too, thankfully it automatically backed up) and suddenly, all my activity data was gone. GONE.

One and a half years I played slave to those little red, blue and green rings. One and a half years I won my little awards and logged countless miles of me running. I had even gotten my move streak to 100 days in a row! (And that was with a calorie goal of 420 calories). As well as had acheived my move goal for 365 days.

There is some sort of difference, I discovered after wading through information afterwards, between a cloud backup and an iTunes backup and the back up being encrypted or unencrypted and basically, I was never getting any of my activity or health data back.

So.

Before you restore your iPhone, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Make sure you either backup to the cloud, or if you backup through iTunes, you turn encryption ON!

The encryption saves your health and other “sensitive” data. Without encryption, you will lose it all like I did.