Jumping from iPhone 7 Plus to iPhone 12 Pro Max. How to Transfer files?

My current iPhone 7 Plus will be replaced by an iPhone 12 Pro Max early next week. My thoughts are to do do a factory reset on the new-to-me 12 Pro Max and a 7 Plus backup to my Mac and also to iCloud.

Where to go from there?

Do I simply “restore from backup” to the new 12 Pro Max?

Assuming the old one is up to date on iOS and not having issues…I would just do a backup to your Mac and restore from that…that process has never failed me.

Yes, to have good backups always important. Factory Reset on the iPhone 12, then put both next to each other on the table, switch on and follow the flow. Mac not necessarily involved.

The iPhone 7 Plus is up to date, but that is several versions of iOS old. I am unsure if such a large jump will be a problem.

Thanks for the tip.

That should be fine. Apple won’t let you restore a from a backup with a newer version of iOS to a device with an older version, but the opposite should be fine. The worst case is that if there is a problem you just factory reset the 12 PM and rebuild it from scratch.

But one thing that can make it really easy is to make sure you have as many things syncing with iCloud (or another service for calendar and contacts) as possible. messages is particularly helpful if you need to build from scratch. Health if you keep track of those items, have a watch, etc. If you have the iCloud space available, you can turn on iCloud Photo Library (if you don’t already), and then a phone rebuilt from scratch will get all of the photos from iCloud as well. (Or, of course, you can sync with iTunes / Finder, the old-fashioned way.) The iCloud items are in settings / Apple ID / iCloud.

True…but the one time I tried it that way it took a lot longer and I’ve always thought that backup/restore via cable was a cleaner idea anyway. All the apps need to be downloaded again anyway but settings, custom sounds, prefs, etc are all in the backup on the Mac assuming you set a password for the backup

I would tend to think that Apple’s restore procedure takes that into account…especially as the alternative is to start from scratch and reset everything which would be a huge pain. Google says that the 7 supports iOS 15 and that’s only 2 versions back…so it should work just fine.