Next Friday I’m receiving my new iPhone 18 Pro Max, and to be honest, I really don’t feel like spending two days setting everything up from scratch, DTTG apart. So, this time I’m planning to do a full migration via cable or iCloud.
The last time I migrated DTTG to a new device that way, things didn’t go smoothly. First, DTTG was reinstalled on the new phone, then the iCloud sync state was restored, and after that, DTTG started re-downloading everything from the WebDAV sync store from scratch, finally re-indexing the whole library.
Normally, if you only have one or a couple of small databases, this process is fairly quick. In my case, however, I have around 700 GB across my databases, so doing this puts immense strain on battery health, causes significant thermal throttling, and worse: it can easily take several days to complete.
What I’ve done up to now is install DTTG from scratch on the new phone, configure it, and then download database by database until everything is fully synced. While that still takes days, at least I retain full control over the workload—even resting the phone on the aluminum stand of my Apple Display to dissipate heat while it indexes the incoming data.
Is there any way to simply copy the existing database over directly? I don’t care whether it’s via cable transfer, iCloud restore, or an encrypted Mac backup, but I want to avoid babysitting this process for days.