I just tried to pair my Galaxy Watch4 with a new Samsung Galaxy phone—and Samsung requires you to reset the watch before pairing to a new device.
Fine. Annoying, but fine. That’s what backups are for, right?
Except… apparently they’re not.
I’ve now tried restoring from my backup through the Galaxy Wearable app almost TEN times. Each time, the process:
Asks me to turn on automatic backups (which I already had on).
Goes through what looks like a restore.
Says it’s restoring the watch.
Then pops up with: “Cannot do automatic backup because there is already an existing backup.”
Offers to overwrite or restore.
No matter how many times I tap “Restore,” it just loops back to the same screen.
This is not a random glitch—searching online shows people have been complaining about this exact bug for YEARS. And it’s not just older models—owners of Watch7 and Watch8 are reporting the same broken restore loop.
So my questions to Samsung are:
Why hasn’t this been fixed when it’s a known and widely reported problem?
Why is the only official method for pairing to a new phone guaranteed to force a total manual reconfiguration?
How is it acceptable for a backup/restore feature to exist in name only?
Samsung, please explain why your own hardware + software ecosystem can’t reliably back up and restore settings between your own devices. Customers deserve better than “start from scratch” as the default solution.
PS: Save your time and mine and do not give me advice on how to make this process work. I will restore my watch manually. I really expected more from you Samsung. What a disappointment this all turned out to be.
PPS: I can't even get this form to give me a preview of my post.
If the backup was already restored to the watch, turn off the automatic backup, then delete the current backup and then turn auto backup back on. You can also just ignore it and continue on. You are getting that message because your last automatic backup was the same day for the same watch. When you connect to a new phone, it supposedly makes an automatic backup, but usually fails for just this reason. If you had a new/different watch, the backup from the old watch would be restored and a baseline backup of the new watch would proceed. Since you transferred the same watch to a new phone, this is why the immediate backup fails. Subsequent backups will proceed as normal.
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Yeah. The Galaxy watch backups are useless. I learned this during the time when I had to keep resetting and re-pairing my GWU because of a bug they took forever to fix. I just quit trying after the umpteenth time I had to do it.
