Creating Periodic Apple Watch Backups

Deggie, thanks for weighing in but after reading your challenge to my assertion, I went on a lengthy live Apple Support Chat with two levels of agents and they both confirmed what I said, namely that under the current iOS and watchOS, the Apple Watch is only backed up when you do an Unpair command. I think you are confusing when Apple Watch backups are created with when the iPhone is backed up to iTunes or iCloud which is as you say. You can confirm my point yourself by pulling up your current list of Apple Watch backups on your paired iPhone. My hope is if enough of us are made aware of this design shortcoming that we can Feedback Apple into fixing it. If you're not sure how to find your Apple Watch backups on your iPhone, go to your iPhone Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> wait for the list to fill in and then scroll down to Watch (alas the list is sorted by storage space used rather than by app name so you have to search a long list. -> touch Watch in the list and you’ll see a list of your Apple Watch backup images with their dates which you can selectively delete. Note the back up images are tiny so they don’t store much and they thus tend to be located towards the bottom of the long list. Be prepared to be shocked and dismayed as I was! Thanks again.

Thanks ConnorfromGrinnell for your speedy but alas incorrect reply. Until my recent disaster with my 4th Gen Apple Watch, I too had mistakenly believed that my Watch was being backed up frequently to my iPhone, how frequently I didn't know but I presumed it was frequent enough to cover lost, stolen or damaged Apple Watch situations adequately. To the contrary, to my utter dismay, the iPhone ONLY makes a backup of your paired Apple Watch when you unpair it, which obviously in the case of an unexpected Watch loss, theft or disabling damage situation, one is unable to accomplish. I desperately hope Apple will address this serious design shortcoming in next week's announcements and failing that, do a better job of letting Watch owners know the peril they're in.

Dear Julieda, thank you for your very useful weblink revealing where the illusive Apple Watch backup is stored on the iPhone and be selectively deleted. However as you will see in my reply below to ConnorFromGrinnell, the problem my recent calamity revealed is that despite your weblink being correct, the iPhone does not regularly create backups for our Apple Watches, instead only doing so on the rare occasion when the Watch is unpaired from the iPhone, something ordinarily occurring only when upgrading to a replacement Watch from a working older Watch. Thanks again though for the worthy weblink.