How can I restore a backup of a phone with the same name?

I broke my iPhone 3G S and bought a new one. During the setup of the new one I chose to set it up as a new phone. I gave it a slightly different name because I thought I'd want to keep old phone's backups and new phone's backups separate.

I now need to restore the old phone's backup to the new phone.

Using iTunes, I renamed the new phone to match the name on the backup I want to restore from, mistakenly thinking that iTunes would automatically associate the new phone and the old backup by name. The old backup doesn’t show in the drop-down selection box.

How can I access the old backup and restore it to the new phone?

Solution 1:

you need to reset the phone to factory settings so that iTunes think's it's a new phone

it will then ask you if you want to restore from a previous backup and you can restore from any of them that are still on the system.