How to restore a backup in Windows 10 Mobile, 950XL

Hi Bill,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

You have to reset your phone to factory settings, and then sign in with the same Microsoft Account you used to back up your data.

For more information, you may click on the link below and refer the article.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/support/product/lumia535-dual-sim/smartguidance/?action=singleTopic&topic=B-GUID-09A6A732-F24F-40CF-B96F-483FCA055284-8_10_1

Hope this helps. Please respond if you have further related queries.

Regards,

Jesinta Rozario

I recently moved from a Lumia 640XL under 8.1 Mobile to a 950XL under 10 Mobile. Even though I had taken the precaution of doing a backup of my phone – through WiFi –  before turning it off, upon restore to the new phone I had lost the latest 3 months of message and phone call history.

There really *should* be an app that allows users to _manage_ the backup contents and restore what they select, rather than a one-shot all-or-nothing built-in feature.

Please pass this request on to whoever is in a position to DO something about it. Thank you.

Windows Phone restoration of a backup on OneDrive

What I learned from multiple emails and chat sessions is that a Windows phone backup is tied to the username of the Microsoft Account used when creating the backup.  This could be different than the default account assigned when rebooting the Windows Phone following a factory reset.  In my case, the reboot process defaulted to the numeric phone number as the login username rather than a normal username.  I used the default login provided and used the password associated with one of my Microsoft Accounts.  When the reboot got to the "Do you want to restore a backup" activity, the date on the backup did not match the date of the backup that I had created prior to the factory reset throught the "Settings/Backup" function on my phone.  When I logged onto OneDrive.com using that same login, that same "invalid" backup was shown in the Options/Device Backup section of OneDrive (a backup is not maintained under the "Files" folder).  Initially, I thought that the valid backup that I had created prior to the factory reset had been replaced by this other invalid backup.  But where was my valid backup?  What I learned was that my valid backup was still fine, but only visible when I logged in with my other Microsoft Account login.  Evidently, Windows Phone automatically associates the phone number of your phone to one of your Microsoft Accounts so that you can login with either the normal username or the phone number and get to a valid OneDrive space.

So, I performed another factory reset, but this time I logged in with the login associated with the valid backup instead of the default one provided.  When it got to the "Do you want to restore a backup" step, it showed the valid backup, which I selected and it proceeded to restore all that it had backed up.

So please take care in identifying who you login as when you create the backup and definitely use that same username in the factory reset reboot process.  Hope this helps someone else save the countless hours that it took me to figure this one out.

Hi Bill,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

You have to reset your phone to factory settings, and then sign in with the same Microsoft Account you used to back up your data.

For more information, you may click on the link below and refer the article.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/support/product/lumia535-dual-sim/smartguidance/?action=singleTopic&topic=B-GUID-09A6A732-F24F-40CF-B96F-483FCA055284-8_10_1

Hope this helps. Please respond if you have further related queries.

Regards,

Jesinta Rozario

It doesn't help. It happened the same to me. I think it's a Microsoft bug 👎

The Lumia / Onedrive backup functionality is essentially flawed.

There is no control over it at all. It is one backup file that overwrites itself, a copy cannot be downloaded and stored offline and there are no filters for what gets backed up and what will be restored. 

With reasonable control over any of the above this could have been truly useful and perhaps even provided a cloud restore point that would go some way to negating the shonky software ecosystem that Microsoft are curating. 

At present if I try a hard reset because my device is constantly rebooting I only have the one backup to restore - so whatever settings I changed or shonky app I installed that is crashing my system is restored straight back in.

I am honestly starting to wonder if Microsoft devs even use their own products....