How to restore your iOS devices from iTunes backup on Mac

The latest version comes with speed-up folder animations, a new Control Center splash page, redesigned emoji characters and more features. However, there is one important point that people need to keep in mind. Before you update your iOS devices to iOS 10, you should backup your iPhone on iTunes or iCloud. Because the update may erase all your data on your device.
After the update is finished, you can restore iOS devices from iTunes backup or iCloud backup. iTunes is always the first choice for iOS devices to backup data as the official software, but many users don’t know how to restore iPhone/iPad/iPod touch from iTunes backup on their Mac. Today, we will focus on showing you how to finish the task on Mac.

Using iTunes Backup

Before restoring iPhone from iTunes backup, you may also need to know how to back up iPhone to iTunes on Mac. It is very easy to accomplish the operation with three steps.

Step 1. Connect your iOS device to your Mac using an USB cable. Then launch iTunes.
Step 2. Click device button in the top right corner of iTunes. Then click “Summary” in the left sidebar.
Step 3. Click “Back up Now” in the right part, iTunes will begin to backup your device.

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After you have finish your updating on your iPhone, you can restore iPhone backup from iTunes. Obviously, we always choose to restore backup from iTunes directly.

Step 1. Connect your iPhone to your computer using an USB cable. Then launch iTunes.

Step 2. Click device button to the left of the iTunes Store button in the top right corner in iTunes. Then click “Summary” in the left sidebar.

Step 3. Click “Restore Backup” in the right part, iTunes will begin to restore your device.

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  • What You can Do When iTunes doesn’t Work

When using iTunes to recover iOS devices on Mac, you may encounter with some frustrating problems. For example, iTunes cannot detect the device after the device is connected to Mac with the USB cable. Or you see an alert that says an error occurred during the process of restoration. In this situation, there are several tips that you can take advantage of to fix the iTunes issues.

  • Make sure that you have the latest version of iTunes.
  • Check the USB cable to see whether it is workable. If the USB cable is good, then you need to find another Mac to check out whether the iPhone can be detected by the computer.
  • Turn off both your Mac and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Then turn them on again.
  • If you own more than one computer, try to make a backup on your other Mac. Or, use iCloud to back up your device and restore from your iCloud backup.
  • If you see an alert that says an error occurred, check that you have the latest version of iOS.
  • If an alert says that your backup is corrupt or incompatible, contact Apple Support.

  • How about Third-party Applications?

If you find that iTunes doesn’t work on your Mac during the process of restoring iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, you could also use third-party applications to finish the task. There are plenty of apps out there that promise to restore iOS devices from iTunes backup on Mac for you, and they likely do so, but I’d like to recommend one of them. Let’s check it out.

The iOS data recovery software for Mac is released by Leawo Software. It enables you to directly recover deleted files from iOS devices if you have no previous iTunes/iCloud backup. And it’s nice to extract various kinds of files from iTunes/iCloud backup. The software enables you to recover data from iTunes backup even though your iTunes doesn’t work. Also it can help you preview and select the files you want to recover. The following steps will show you how to use that.

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Step 1. Run Leawo iOS Data Recovery on Mac and you’ll see the 3 recovery modes in the main interface. Choose “Recover from iTunes Backup” in the window.

Step 2. Select the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch backup and click “Scan” button at the right bottom.

Step 3. After the software scan your iTunes backup, select the data you need. Then click “Recover” button.

Step 4. Click “Open” button in the pop-up dialog to choose a target folder on your Mac. And you could click “Go” button to begin to restore iPhone from iTunes backup. When restoration is finished, you will get the files on your Mac.

Conclusions:

Most of us may get used to restoring our iPhone/iPad/iPod with iTunes on Mac. As the official application released by Apple, iTunes does give us much help on data backup & recovery. But if your iTunes doesn’t work or you just want to recover selective files from iTunes backup, the third-party applications are also a good choice. Apart from iTunes and third-party applications, iCloud is also helpful for data recovery. People can choose one of them according to their actual needs.