The Sting of Loss

I’m going to start out by saying that this is a total first world problem. Consider yourself forewarned.

Loss.

Whatever it is, it’s never easy.

Life.

A child.

A spouse.

Your retirement.

Data.

Wait… Data?

Yes. Data.

Or roughly about eight months of your history in Apple Health.

The first world-ism is about to get worse. I promise.

You see, this week I got the new Apple Watch. There was nothing wrong at all with my series 3, but I’d been toying with the idea of getting the LTE version. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well get the latest version, am I right?

So I did. I exchanged the 3 for a 4. And I activated it on my carrier. This was Tuesday.

Fast forward to Today. I’m poking around Apple Health and I notice that it has both watches listed. I identify the old one by noticing that it says the watch is no longer syncing with this phone.

Thinking I’ll just tidy things up, I delete this watch from Health. It took me a little bit, but I eventually realized my mistake…

I’d been tracking data in Apple Health since early March. Everything up until Tuesday suddenly disappeared. Eight months worth of data, gone in the blink of an eye.

Just for kicks, I decided to make my life even more interesting by wiping my phone and restoring from backup. Surely iCloud has been backing up my health data as part of my phone’s nightly backup.

Turns out, it wasn’t. And I suspect that’s because I also have Health data syncing enabled for iCloud. Since it syncs with iCloud, no need to back it up to iCloud, right?

Surely you wouldn’t do something as foolish as deleting a device in your Health sources, now would you?

I certainly hope you, dear reader, don’t fall into this trap.

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