iPhone 6 restored from encrypted iPhone 5S backup doesn't retain passwords

I have a new iPhone 6. It is replacing an iPhone 5S. I plug this into my iMac every day via an original Apple Lightning cable, and iTunes automatically creates encrypted backups.

I have successfully restored half-a-dozen iPhones in the past from encrypted backups. However, this time the iPhone 6 is requiring all my app and email passwords to be manually re-entered.

Why were my passwords not retained when I restored from the encrypted backup?

Any ideas how I can force a successful restore including passwords?

Possible quirks which may have contributed to this problem:

1. I had upgraded the 5S to iOS 8.1 before I first tried restoring. The 6 was shipped with an earlier version, so I needed to update to 8.1 before I could attempt to restore my backup to it.

2. When I tried to restore from a backup the transfer process would hang when transferring apps. I was eventually able to avoid that problem by disabling sync over Wi-Fi first.

(For reasons that leave me completely bamboozled, when I have tried to manually enter email account passwords by copying the passwords stored in my iMac's Keychain, some of them are being rejected. I presume this is simply operator error, but can't work out whether it's a failure to transpose correctly, or a failure to identify the correct password in the first place.)

Solution 1:

I just have had the same issue when I try to restore 5S backup into 6. After a few attempts, it eventually worked fine. Here's what I did for the successful try:

• Take old iPhone backup with encryption on
• Reset all content / all settings on new iPhone without connection to PC / Mac
• Go through startup config on new iPhone until you see "Set Up iPhone" screen, which let you select the options to restore from iCloud / iTunes backup
• Select "Restore from iTunes backup"
• Connect to PC/Mac and select backup you want to restore
• Done!

It wasn't successful when I tried to restore without reset, or without going through startup config. Hope this helps