Can you restore from a backup that was made on a previous version of iOS?

Hello.
I had an iPhone 3GS unning whatever the latest proper version of iOS currently is at the time of writing (4.3.5, is it?) but on Saturday I was on a rather drunken night out and I lost my phone.
Silly me.
But I was out of contract and the new iPhone (4S or 5 or whatever) is going to be announced on Tuesday next week (just been confirmed by Apple today) so I'm just going to make do with an old, spare Nokia until the new iPhone is available in the UK.
Once the new iPhone launches I will buy it, plug it into iTunes and just restore from backup and I'm back in business.
Except for one thing... The new iPhone will have iOS 5 installed and my last backup before I lost my 3GS was done on iOS 4.3.5.
Is this going to be a problem or can you restore from a backup made with an older version of the OS?
I've never done it before so I don't know.
J

You "should" have no problem doing that. I say should, because you can't restore a backup made with a higher iOS on a device running a lower iOS, I.E. - you can't restore a backup made from a device running, let's say iOS 4.3.5 on a device running iOS 4.2.10. However, iOS 5.0 will present many new features and since it has not been released, I have no way of stating with certainty that doing as you plan will not present any problems. Past history indicates it won't, but we'll have to wait & see.

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When you create an iCloud backup, in most of the cases, the old one is overwritten and iCloud keeps the three latest backups, so the old ones were overwritten or deleted

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To make this short, my phone is having a few problems. They have been happening ever since my last sync. Is it possible to restore from the last backup, or do I need to do a complete restore? And if the latter, what will be missing after the restore- can I just restore and then put all my music/contacts/video/apps back on? Will I lose any content, such as pictures I have taken on the phone, text messages, calendar events? Is that not what the backup is for?
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Your iPhone's backup includes data such as most iPhone settings, email account settings, contact info, SMS messages, notes, recent calls, call favorites, photos in your iPhone's camera roll, and 3rd party app settings and data created and stored by a 3rd party app. All other data transferred to your iPhone from your computer via the iTunes sync process should remain on your computer.
Photos in your iPhone's camera roll should be imported by your computer as with any other digital camera.
Contact info and calendar events is designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer. Not a good idea to depend on your iPhone's backup alone for this data and the same for photos in your iPhone's camera roll since your iPhone's backup includes other data.
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Hello John!
Thank you for your response which solved my problem. For other users who may stumble upon this, I'll clear up the confusion and share how I solved the problem with your help; When looking for answers to my computer problems, finding unresolved questions where person B offers a solution and person A never comes back and says "That worked, thank you.", it demonstrates a "k-thnx-bye" user mentality that leaves others with the same problem lost. Without further ado:
It is not clear what you did because the meaning of "clean install" is vague. You can erase a volume and install an OS which leaves none of its previous content intact,
This is what I did: I erased the volume leaving no previous content intact, while then installing OS X Mountain Lion.
or you can upgrade an existing OS (or reinstall the same one) which does not alter your user - installed files.
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That makes sense and is just as I later suspected.
If so, how can I re-do the last portion of the process so that I get all my home-folder files and apps back without the full bulk of old Lion files? Migration assistant I'm guessing?
Yes.
This is what I did and everything works perfectly. Thank you so much once again!
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As many times as you want till you delete or modify it.
It's YOUR backup, a copy of all your stuff.
Not some copyrighted, access controlled bunch of bytes representing a picture, a song or a movie, with a bunch of lawyers from the entertainment maff1a hellbent on restricting what you can do with it.

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plawatap wrote:
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Can you restore from a backup that was made on a previous version of iOS?

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