HealthKit is one of the major new additions in iOS 8. For obvious reasons, this is a place on your iPhone where all personal information is collected. Your HealthKit data is therefore very important, if only because there are now hundreds of apps that use this database. In this tip we’ll explain to you how you can make a HealthKit backup, so you can not lose your data.
You can loose your HealthKit data
Getting rid of your HealthKit data is a real risk. If you make a backup of your iPhone, it will NOT make a back up of HealthKit, unless you activate a specific function for that. For privacy reasons, the HealthKit data isn’t stored by default in iCloud or on your computer.
How to make a back-up of your data
To include HealthKit in the backup, you need to connect the iPhone to your Mac or PC. Go to the overview page of your iPhone in iTunes and check the option “Encrypt iPhone backup” checkbox. This adds an extra protection to the iPhone backups, making it safe for your account passwords and health data. This option can not be set on your iPhone; you have to connect and access your iPhone via iTunes to turn on encryption.
So in conclusion: If you do not activate this feature, you will lose your HealthKit data when you need to restore the iPhone or restore a backup back on your iPhone. Without encrypted iPhone data backup, that Healthkit information is not included in the backup.
HealthKit allows app developers to exchange all sorts of health and sports data. For example, it allows an app that lets you keep your eating habits, immediately read your weight from another app. All data is available via the Health app, which you can find on any iPhone with iOS 8.