Transferring Data from Old iPhone to New iPhone 16: A Step-by-Step Guide

With the release of the new iPhone 16, many users are upgrading from their old devices and transferring their data. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of transferring data from an old iPhone to a new iPhone 16.

As soon as I started the beta program for the iPhone 16, I was prompted to complete some tasks to get familiar with the device. I tapped on "Continue" to begin the process, and if I were on the beta program, I would have been asked to install updates. However, since I wasn't on a beta program at that time, I skipped this step.

Next, I received an emergency SOS briefing, which informed me about the new features of Emergency SOS on the iPhone 16. This feature allows users to quickly send messages and make calls in case of an emergency.

After completing the briefings, I noticed that my device had a software update available for download. As I was using the beta program, this step wasn't necessary for me, but it's essential for anyone who is on a beta program or wants to install the latest updates on their iPhone 16.

Once I had completed the software update, I could proceed with transferring data from my old iPhone to the new one. Since I had customized my old iPhone earlier, we started by going through those settings again. The location services were enabled, and I was prompted to add any cards or information that I had stored in Apple Wallet on my old iPhone.

I chose not to add these later, as it's always a good idea to do so if you don't know your CBB code (Customer Billing Code). Once the Apple account balance was added, we moved on to the next step – tapping "Continue" on the setup screen.

On this screen, users can see an estimated time of how long the transfer process will take. However, as someone who has transferred data many times in the past, I can confidently say that this is an overestimate. It usually takes less time than what's displayed on the screen. Nevertheless, it's always better to be safe than sorry.

As my old iPhone was transferring its data to the new one, I took a short break and watched a video – "Watch: First Things to Do on the iPhone 16." This video provided valuable information about everything the new device is capable of, and I found it extremely helpful. If you've already seen this video, I recommend checking out my other videos, such as "iOS 18 First Settings to Change Video," which might be useful for you as well.

Once the data transfer was complete, we moved on to setting up the new iPhone 16. To do so, I tapped "Continue" and then selected the old device that I had upgraded from. If I wanted to erase my old iPhone completely, I could have done so at this point. However, if I planned on trading it in or selling it, I would need to erase its data first.

Fortunately, since I was simply transferring data from my old iPhone to a new one, we didn't need to erase the old device's data. Instead, I could continue with the setup process as usual. As you can see, everything on the new iPhone 16 looks and feels identical to the settings and layout of my old iPhone – which is a convenient feature for users who are used to the way their devices were set up in the past.

Before moving forward, I decided to check on the Apple Watch app to ensure that my Apple watch had transferred its data successfully. Since I was wearing the Apple Watch series 10 at the time, it took a bit of time for the connection to be established. However, once it did, everything appeared to be in order.

Finally, I noticed that all my applications were waiting to be downloaded and installed on the new iPhone 16. The estimated download time varied depending on my internet connection, but I was confident that everything would be transferred successfully in no time.

In conclusion, transferring data from an old iPhone to a new iPhone 16 is a relatively straightforward process. By following these steps, users can easily transfer their data and enjoy their new device with all its features intact. If you have any issues or concerns during the process, don't hesitate to reach out – I'd be happy to help in any way I can.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today I'm going to be showing you how to transfer everything over from your old iPhone to a brand new iPhone 16 16 plus 16 Pro or 16 Pro Max now this process can be scary but that's why I'm here to make it simple and seamless and not so scary so you can get everything transferred over to your new iPhone without issue and thankfully Apple continues to make this process better and easier year after year so we're going to be transferring over all of my photos messages cont taxs applications and everything else from this old iPhone to this 16 Pro Max but again this will work on any iPhone 16 and we will also cover the process of switching over from a physical Sim to an eim and also the eim to eim transfer okay so first off you should be on the Hello screen on your iPhone 16 but if for some reason you are not if you already went into the device this is how you get back to that screen so you just need to go into your settings go to General and then go down to the bottom and go to transfer or reset iPhone tap on that and then you want to go to erase all content and settings at the bottom and then tap on that and then from here you just want to continue and erase everything from this iPhone and again this should be the iPhone 16 your new device if you already went through this initial setup and you want to be able to transfer everything over from your old device okay so now we're ready to begin and the first thing you want to do is make sure that you're on the latest software version that your old iPhone supports so go into your settings General software update and make sure you are up to dat this will just speed up the process and could avoid any issues now if you get a prompt to update your new iPhone at all throughout the setup process you need to do that right away not later not after the transfer do that before the transfer begins okay so the next thing you want to do is make an iCloud backup on your existing iPhone your old iPhone now this is not required but it is recommended so in these settings application tap on your name up top go into iCloud and then go down to iCloud backup and from here you want to make sure that you press back up now especially if you see that your last successful backup was more than a day old okay so we have our backup done now we can go back to our home screen and we want to go ahead and unlock our iPhone 16 now you should see a prompt on your old iPhone but if you do not you just need to lock the old iPhone and then unlock it and you should see the prompt to set up new iPhone and if it continues to not pop up just keep trying to lock and unlock both devices and if that still doesn't work just try a reset a reboot on your old iPhone and that could also be an issue with software so make sure you are on the latest software version so we're going to unlock to continue put in your passcode so now we need to take our old iPhone and scan this orb with the old iPhone's camera so very simple just get it a little bit close right there and boom so it says continue on your other phone and now on your other phone your old phone you will see who are you signing in to the iPhone so it's either you or if you have a child setup you can set it up for them as well I'm just going to do for me you will have to put in the passcode of the old device so now it's going to activate the iPhone and you can see it already has our Wi-Fi connection now it transfer that over from the old iPhone to the new iPhone and the first prompt you'll see is for transferring over your phone number so you definitely want to do this right now you can set this up later in settings if you would like to but usually just transferring over right way will avoid any issues so we're going to tap on transfer and it says transfer your phone number once it's transferred it will stop working on your other phone so just keep that in mind we're going to transfer number and you will have to confirm this on the old iPhone as well so you will have to double click and authenticate to ensure that you want to transfer over that phone number so we're going to do that and by the way if you have a physical SIM card this is where you will be prompted to set it up and convert it into an eim so once you convert your physical SIM card into an eim the physical SIM card you can just throw that away you won't need it any longer because everything is eim moving forward so it says activating eim you can continue setting up your iPhone while your eim is activating so we'll tap on continue okay so we have our data and privacy screen so we could just go ahead and tap on continue on that you don't need to set anything up for that and now we have face ID so you will need to set up your face ID that's one of the few things you will have to redo during this transfer process so if you don't want to do that you can just set up later but I'm just going to do it now I think everybody should do it now while you're here and then you'll get the prompt to to use face ID with a mask so you can have that set up if you would like to I'm not going to do that I don't wear a mask at the moment so I'm going to pass on that face ID is now set up so we can go ahead and tap on continue okay so now we're on the transfer your data screen so this is where you choose between an iCloud restore or an iPhone to iPhone restore so it shows you the time to transfer is going to be longer when you do it from iPhone to iPhone at least for me so it says 15 minutes for iCloud but 30 to 40 minutes for transfer from iPhone so if you're crunched for time and you have a really fast Wi-Fi network then downloading from iCloud would be fine however I usually choose to transfer from another iPhone even though it might take a little bit longer because I usually am able to stay logged in to most of my applications including social media applications and it keeps a lot more data I've noticed when I transfer from iPhone and you might stay logged in for some things when you download from iCloud but I've just noticed that you stay logged into to more applications when you transfer from iPhone so we're going to tap on that and this will also copy over your wallpaper your lock screen your widgets you know everything that you've customized on your device will also be transferred over when you do the devic to device transfer and that's also why I like it better than iCloud so from here it says make this your new iPhone so you can customize what you want to switch over so if you don't want everything switched over you can customize that so if you go into your settings for example it will show you exactly what is being transferred over and then also for connections so this is where you'll see your Apple watch connections as well so it will transfer over the Apple watch pairings and then if you go to customize right here you have some additional options so you get to change if you want to update your iPhone automatically I'm going to just do download automatically you have your iMessage and FaceTime so if you don't want that set up you can just tap on not now but I'm going to continue because I do want that to be set up with the new device and same with location services and same with the Apple watch so I do want to use every Apple watch that I was using with my old device my 15 Pro Max main device so we're going to continue and now screen time you can have that set up if you would like to and then analytics you can share or do not share we get a little prompt for silent mode so it's just telling us that that exists and we do also have a new little splash screen here for the action button so you can customize that from here I'm just going to tap not now for that and then here we go we have the demo for the camera control which is a new iPhone 16 feature of course you probably know that by now so you can just continue on that and now we have the series set up so you want to go ahead and tap on continue and this is where you'll choose your voice whichever one you like best so I'll choose voice two and I'm going to skip all this say Siri how's the weather and all that so we're going to we're going to skip that so now we have improved Siri and dictation so you can share your audio recordings I'm going to opt out of that and say not now and now you get the option to continue beta testing so if you're on beta software you will get this prompt which I was on beta software here so you will probably not see this if you are not running the beta so you can either continue or not continue with the beta program so if I tap on continue it will likely make me install the updates and then we have an emergency SOS little briefing here to tell us what's new with emergency SOS and now you can see I do have a software update so if you are on a beta you will have the software update available right here and I would recommend going ahead and doing that okay so we are back from the software update I had to get my device on the same version as my old device so we're just going to continue at this section now I did customize earlier but we'll go ahead and continue and you can see it shows us our location services so we'll go ahead and turn that on now and you'll get prompted to add in any of your cards that you had in apple wallet so you could always add these later if you don't know your CBB code which I do not so I'll add this later and it shows our Apple account balance has been added and now if you are on 18.1 you will see the Apple intelligence splash screen right here we'll go ahead and tap on continue okay so now we're on the transferring data screen so this is going to show you how much time it will potentially take to transfer over all of the data now after doing this so many times for so many years I can tell you that this is an overestimate so they estimate for a longer period of time than it typically takes so I would not expect to trust the time remaining to be the exact amount of time it will take to transfer all your data over usually it takes less now of course this does depend on how much you know data you are transferring over so if you're not transferring over as much data as me yours might be 15 minutes but mine right now it says 2 hours I would not expect that so it's currently 132 we'll see how long it takes and by the way while your data is transferring I would recommend going to watch my first things to do on the iPhone 16 video so you can learn about everything new that your device is capable of it's a great video I think you'll learn a lot from it and if you already watched that check out my iOS 18 first settings to change video I think you might find that useful as well and there we go transfer complete so it took about an hour and 10 minutes for me but again I had a lot of data that was being transferred over so yours will most likely be less than that but again it was still less than the initial time it gave me of 2 hours so again it usually overshoots it so let's go a and tap on continue on the old device now if you want to erase this iPhone you can so if you plan on you know either trading this in to Apple or selling it on eBay you should go ahead and continue with erasing this iPhone you could always do this later but this is the time to do it if you are planning on getting rid of it after transferring all your data so here we are on the iPhone 16 Pro Max so you can see that yes we now have the same layout so we're in a focus mode right now so let's get out of that Focus mode and you can see that the wallpaper is the same our widgets are the same our app layout is the same so pretty much everything is going to transfer over exactly how you had it beforehand which is very convenient now I want to check in the Apple Watch app to make sure that my Apple watch did transfer over so you can see it didn't at first so it said it was trying trying to establish the connection so looks like we might have an issue there let's figure this out so I'm currently wearing the Apple Watch series 10 so let's just give that some time and come back to that so it will connect to it it just may take a little bit so you can see it's already starting to connect to it right there so cool that's good and all these applications you see on your home screen that say waiting those are the applications that are currently downloading so those will either go fast or slow depending on your internet connection and you can see all of my photos are here everything is here from the old iPhone so there we go that is how you transfer all of your data over from an old iPhone to the new iPhone 16 so hope this video was helpful if it was I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up if you had any issues whatsoever let me know in a comment down below and I would do my best to get back to you to try to help you out so if you want to see more iPhone 16 tips and tricks and just coverage in general be sure to subscribe to the channel I have a lot of videos coming on the iPhone 16 but anyways guys thanks for watching and I'll see you soonwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today I'm going to be showing you how to transfer everything over from your old iPhone to a brand new iPhone 16 16 plus 16 Pro or 16 Pro Max now this process can be scary but that's why I'm here to make it simple and seamless and not so scary so you can get everything transferred over to your new iPhone without issue and thankfully Apple continues to make this process better and easier year after year so we're going to be transferring over all of my photos messages cont taxs applications and everything else from this old iPhone to this 16 Pro Max but again this will work on any iPhone 16 and we will also cover the process of switching over from a physical Sim to an eim and also the eim to eim transfer okay so first off you should be on the Hello screen on your iPhone 16 but if for some reason you are not if you already went into the device this is how you get back to that screen so you just need to go into your settings go to General and then go down to the bottom and go to transfer or reset iPhone tap on that and then you want to go to erase all content and settings at the bottom and then tap on that and then from here you just want to continue and erase everything from this iPhone and again this should be the iPhone 16 your new device if you already went through this initial setup and you want to be able to transfer everything over from your old device okay so now we're ready to begin and the first thing you want to do is make sure that you're on the latest software version that your old iPhone supports so go into your settings General software update and make sure you are up to dat this will just speed up the process and could avoid any issues now if you get a prompt to update your new iPhone at all throughout the setup process you need to do that right away not later not after the transfer do that before the transfer begins okay so the next thing you want to do is make an iCloud backup on your existing iPhone your old iPhone now this is not required but it is recommended so in these settings application tap on your name up top go into iCloud and then go down to iCloud backup and from here you want to make sure that you press back up now especially if you see that your last successful backup was more than a day old okay so we have our backup done now we can go back to our home screen and we want to go ahead and unlock our iPhone 16 now you should see a prompt on your old iPhone but if you do not you just need to lock the old iPhone and then unlock it and you should see the prompt to set up new iPhone and if it continues to not pop up just keep trying to lock and unlock both devices and if that still doesn't work just try a reset a reboot on your old iPhone and that could also be an issue with software so make sure you are on the latest software version so we're going to unlock to continue put in your passcode so now we need to take our old iPhone and scan this orb with the old iPhone's camera so very simple just get it a little bit close right there and boom so it says continue on your other phone and now on your other phone your old phone you will see who are you signing in to the iPhone so it's either you or if you have a child setup you can set it up for them as well I'm just going to do for me you will have to put in the passcode of the old device so now it's going to activate the iPhone and you can see it already has our Wi-Fi connection now it transfer that over from the old iPhone to the new iPhone and the first prompt you'll see is for transferring over your phone number so you definitely want to do this right now you can set this up later in settings if you would like to but usually just transferring over right way will avoid any issues so we're going to tap on transfer and it says transfer your phone number once it's transferred it will stop working on your other phone so just keep that in mind we're going to transfer number and you will have to confirm this on the old iPhone as well so you will have to double click and authenticate to ensure that you want to transfer over that phone number so we're going to do that and by the way if you have a physical SIM card this is where you will be prompted to set it up and convert it into an eim so once you convert your physical SIM card into an eim the physical SIM card you can just throw that away you won't need it any longer because everything is eim moving forward so it says activating eim you can continue setting up your iPhone while your eim is activating so we'll tap on continue okay so we have our data and privacy screen so we could just go ahead and tap on continue on that you don't need to set anything up for that and now we have face ID so you will need to set up your face ID that's one of the few things you will have to redo during this transfer process so if you don't want to do that you can just set up later but I'm just going to do it now I think everybody should do it now while you're here and then you'll get the prompt to to use face ID with a mask so you can have that set up if you would like to I'm not going to do that I don't wear a mask at the moment so I'm going to pass on that face ID is now set up so we can go ahead and tap on continue okay so now we're on the transfer your data screen so this is where you choose between an iCloud restore or an iPhone to iPhone restore so it shows you the time to transfer is going to be longer when you do it from iPhone to iPhone at least for me so it says 15 minutes for iCloud but 30 to 40 minutes for transfer from iPhone so if you're crunched for time and you have a really fast Wi-Fi network then downloading from iCloud would be fine however I usually choose to transfer from another iPhone even though it might take a little bit longer because I usually am able to stay logged in to most of my applications including social media applications and it keeps a lot more data I've noticed when I transfer from iPhone and you might stay logged in for some things when you download from iCloud but I've just noticed that you stay logged into to more applications when you transfer from iPhone so we're going to tap on that and this will also copy over your wallpaper your lock screen your widgets you know everything that you've customized on your device will also be transferred over when you do the devic to device transfer and that's also why I like it better than iCloud so from here it says make this your new iPhone so you can customize what you want to switch over so if you don't want everything switched over you can customize that so if you go into your settings for example it will show you exactly what is being transferred over and then also for connections so this is where you'll see your Apple watch connections as well so it will transfer over the Apple watch pairings and then if you go to customize right here you have some additional options so you get to change if you want to update your iPhone automatically I'm going to just do download automatically you have your iMessage and FaceTime so if you don't want that set up you can just tap on not now but I'm going to continue because I do want that to be set up with the new device and same with location services and same with the Apple watch so I do want to use every Apple watch that I was using with my old device my 15 Pro Max main device so we're going to continue and now screen time you can have that set up if you would like to and then analytics you can share or do not share we get a little prompt for silent mode so it's just telling us that that exists and we do also have a new little splash screen here for the action button so you can customize that from here I'm just going to tap not now for that and then here we go we have the demo for the camera control which is a new iPhone 16 feature of course you probably know that by now so you can just continue on that and now we have the series set up so you want to go ahead and tap on continue and this is where you'll choose your voice whichever one you like best so I'll choose voice two and I'm going to skip all this say Siri how's the weather and all that so we're going to we're going to skip that so now we have improved Siri and dictation so you can share your audio recordings I'm going to opt out of that and say not now and now you get the option to continue beta testing so if you're on beta software you will get this prompt which I was on beta software here so you will probably not see this if you are not running the beta so you can either continue or not continue with the beta program so if I tap on continue it will likely make me install the updates and then we have an emergency SOS little briefing here to tell us what's new with emergency SOS and now you can see I do have a software update so if you are on a beta you will have the software update available right here and I would recommend going ahead and doing that okay so we are back from the software update I had to get my device on the same version as my old device so we're just going to continue at this section now I did customize earlier but we'll go ahead and continue and you can see it shows us our location services so we'll go ahead and turn that on now and you'll get prompted to add in any of your cards that you had in apple wallet so you could always add these later if you don't know your CBB code which I do not so I'll add this later and it shows our Apple account balance has been added and now if you are on 18.1 you will see the Apple intelligence splash screen right here we'll go ahead and tap on continue okay so now we're on the transferring data screen so this is going to show you how much time it will potentially take to transfer over all of the data now after doing this so many times for so many years I can tell you that this is an overestimate so they estimate for a longer period of time than it typically takes so I would not expect to trust the time remaining to be the exact amount of time it will take to transfer all your data over usually it takes less now of course this does depend on how much you know data you are transferring over so if you're not transferring over as much data as me yours might be 15 minutes but mine right now it says 2 hours I would not expect that so it's currently 132 we'll see how long it takes and by the way while your data is transferring I would recommend going to watch my first things to do on the iPhone 16 video so you can learn about everything new that your device is capable of it's a great video I think you'll learn a lot from it and if you already watched that check out my iOS 18 first settings to change video I think you might find that useful as well and there we go transfer complete so it took about an hour and 10 minutes for me but again I had a lot of data that was being transferred over so yours will most likely be less than that but again it was still less than the initial time it gave me of 2 hours so again it usually overshoots it so let's go a and tap on continue on the old device now if you want to erase this iPhone you can so if you plan on you know either trading this in to Apple or selling it on eBay you should go ahead and continue with erasing this iPhone you could always do this later but this is the time to do it if you are planning on getting rid of it after transferring all your data so here we are on the iPhone 16 Pro Max so you can see that yes we now have the same layout so we're in a focus mode right now so let's get out of that Focus mode and you can see that the wallpaper is the same our widgets are the same our app layout is the same so pretty much everything is going to transfer over exactly how you had it beforehand which is very convenient now I want to check in the Apple Watch app to make sure that my Apple watch did transfer over so you can see it didn't at first so it said it was trying trying to establish the connection so looks like we might have an issue there let's figure this out so I'm currently wearing the Apple Watch series 10 so let's just give that some time and come back to that so it will connect to it it just may take a little bit so you can see it's already starting to connect to it right there so cool that's good and all these applications you see on your home screen that say waiting those are the applications that are currently downloading so those will either go fast or slow depending on your internet connection and you can see all of my photos are here everything is here from the old iPhone so there we go that is how you transfer all of your data over from an old iPhone to the new iPhone 16 so hope this video was helpful if it was I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up if you had any issues whatsoever let me know in a comment down below and I would do my best to get back to you to try to help you out so if you want to see more iPhone 16 tips and tricks and just coverage in general be sure to subscribe to the channel I have a lot of videos coming on the iPhone 16 but anyways guys thanks for watching and I'll see you soon\n"