This is why even if you are making encrypted backups of your phone, which Apple claims are full backups that store passwords and everything, your Google Authenticator data will be completely gone when you restore. So if you thought that, for example, there would be no reason to store the 16 digit codes 2FA codes as long as you had a multiple backups of your phone, what happens is that you just get locked out of every single website you use for a month.
It also means that if an app is no longer in the app store, there is no way to get that app back even if it would otherwise still work on your phone.
If you look at the text of how the backup process is described in iTunes, they are clearly claiming that a full backup of the phone is getting made, and yet in reality nothing could be further from the truth. It's amazing there aren't multiple billion-dollar class action lawsuits currently pending on this issue.
Not at all true [1].
Everything in the app's container gets backed up with the exception of the app bundle, Library/Caches/, tmp/, and other things the developer explicitly opted out.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/icloud/documentation/data-storag...
It doesn't matter how the phone works or how the apps work. If you can't restore, you don't have a backup. End of story.
tl;dr: If you restore your encrypted backup to the phone that created it, you get your full keychain back. If you restore it to another phone, you only get keychain items that opted in to iCloud syncing.
Did you restore a iOS backup to a different device then the backup was originally created on?
The way that sensitive data is encrypted on iOS (when the proper API's are used), certain types of data can be marked to be only able to be decrypted on the same device. That is, if a backup is restored to a different device, the unique device ID will have changed, and some encrypted items will not be able to be decrypted.
This is intentional. More details at https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
Yes, I had my phone replaced. And if it's intentional that it's supposed to work that way, then Apple shouldn't tell people that they have a full backup and are good to go when that isn't actually the case.
Especially since it makes zero sense for it to even work that way. If the backup is encrypted on your computer, then it should make zero difference whether the phone itself is different.
Regardless though, how it works and why it works the way it does is irrelevant. The issue is with Apple telling users that they have a backup when in fact they do not.
You appear to be talking about iOS.
Not. The. Same. OS.
This is what I hate since iOS 10 and the removal of app sync in iTunes (and with the latest iTunes, apps are completely out without any alternatives). I've avoided upgrading iTunes as well as macOS for this reason. I don't want to sacrifice convenience and waste time spending hours re-downloading all apps from the App Store when I could get it a lot more quickly from a local copy. Apple just doesn't seem willing to recognize how bad connectivity is in most places around the world.
I wait in the hope that Apple will bring out some kind of "Sync" app that's separate from iTunes but works with it to easily backup apps as well as data on computers for quicker restores.
The other poster has a fair point to be upset, it's not at all obvious to a consumer why Google Authenticator would not restore a backup properly to a new device.