Good evening!
Just wanted to share a problem/solution I resolved, with some help from Apple Support.
Today I had my kid’s iPad replaced after the charging port came loose. I set it to restore from the iCloud backup, and I kept getting the message “Some iCloud Data Isn’t Syncing” saying that the end-to-end encrypted data wasn’t syncing.
There was a “Resume Data Sync” option – when I chose that it first asked me for the iPad passcode (easy), and then asked me for the passcode for an old iPhone my kid has for playing music at night. This is an iPhone 5s, with no cell service, and maxed out at iOS 12.5.7.
I entered that passcode correctly, and the new iPad reported that it couldn’t verify the passcode (“There was an error verifying the passcode of your iPhone”) and asked me to enter it another couple of times. After a third attempt, it offered me an “Incorrect Passcode” dialog that had a choice of “Approve With Device”.
When I tapped “Approve with Device”, I got a screen that says “Approve this iPad”, and “Go to one of your other devices signed in to iCloud to approve this iPad.” I have two Macs where he has accounts signed in to his Apple ID, plus the old iPhone. Nothing showed up on either Mac or on the old iPhone.
I repeated this cycle several times. At one point, I changed the name of the old iPhone – and the request for that phone’s passcode used the new name but still failed to recognize the correct passcode. (I had the old iPhone with me and used the passcode on it several times during this process, so I know I was using the correct code.)
My assumption was (and is) that there’s something about the end-to-end encryption system and the use of passcodes that was not implemented as of iOS 12.5.7, but that the system does not recognize that the phone is not capable of doing what it’s supposed to do.
After conferring with three levels of Apple support, the suggestion I got was to log the old iPhone out of the kid’s iCloud account. As soon as I did that, and quit and restarted Settings on the new iPad, the iCloud sync worked like a charm. Later this evening, once the sync was done, I logged the phone back into his iCloud account and everything appears to be working.
So there are two lessons –
(1) If an AppleID is logged in to a machine/device with an old OS, you may have to log out of the AppleID on that device in order to get the restore from backup working on a new device.
(2) When Apple offers “Approve with Device”, it’s using “Device” to mean iPhone or iPad (with relatively recent OS), and is NOT offering a way to approve using a Mac.
Dave