The iPhone 11 series will hit stores in about two months, and plenty of people will buy the newest iPhone, many of them upgrading from older models. As always with hardware upgrades, the first thing you have to do after you’ve set up the new phone is to restore all the data from your old one, so you can enjoy the same experience. There are several ways of doing it, as iPhones can be backed to iCloud or a computer, but Apple just made it even easier. iOS 12.4, released earlier this week, contains a migration feature that lets you move your data from an old device to a new one via wireless or wired transfer.
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If the feature sounds familiar, that’s because we saw traces of it in an iOS 13 beta release. At the time, we wondered how it’d be possible for two iPhones to be connected via a cable to transfer data. It turns out that you can do it with the help of a USB camera adapter and a lightning cable, as 9to5Mac explains.
But it’s even easier to transfer the data wirelessly, over the same Wi-Fi connection. It all happens during the phone’s setup, and the feature completely bypasses iCloud and iTunes backups.
All you have to do to get it started is hold the two iPhones together and perform the Quick Start process. You’ll have to sign in using your Apple ID and set up Face ID or Touch ID. Then you’ll be able to transfer all your data over Wi-Fi or cable.
All your personal information is moved to the new phone, while the apps that you had installed are downloaded directly from the App Store. The iPhone that’s receiving the data will then tell you how long it’ll take for the transfer to complete.
The feature can be handy when setting up a new iPhone at home. But if you plan on trading-in your current device for one of the new iPhone 11 phones, then you might want to back everything up to iCloud or your computer.
