How to keep your health history when something changes.
Devices get replaced. Services change their terms, their pricing, or what they include. Your history should not depend on any of that, and mostly it does not have to. It is worth taking twenty minutes once to make sure.
Find out what you already have
Health tracks where each record came from. Every record carries an identifier for the app that stored it, which is how your phone can tell you exactly what wrote what.
Open the health categories, tap a category, then below Options tap Data Sources & Access. Do that for the few metrics you would actually miss. People usually find both things at once: more history sitting on their phone than they expected, and one or two things they assumed were there that never arrived.
Make sure it is backed up, properly
There are two routes, and one of them has a catch.
The first is iCloud. If you are signed in with your Apple Account, your health and fitness information in the Health app is stored in iCloud automatically, encrypted as it moves between iCloud and your device and while it sits in iCloud. End-to-end encryption for Health data additionally requires two-factor authentication and iOS 12 or later. To check the setting, open the Settings app, tap your name, tap iCloud, tap Show All, tap Health, then turn Sync with iPhone on or off.
The second is a computer backup, and this is the catch: health data is included only if the backup is encrypted. On a Mac, connect the phone with a cable, select it in the Finder sidebar, click General, choose to back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac, select Encrypt local backup, then click Back Up Now. On Windows, the same option lives in iTunes.
That one catches people out. If you have been backing up to a computer for years without ever ticking that box, your health history has not been in any of those backups.
Take an export before you change anything
Open the Health app, tap Summary, tap your picture or initials at the top right, then tap Export All Health Data and choose how to share it. You get an XML file covering what Health holds.
Do this before you cancel a subscription, switch devices, or let an account lapse. Not after.
What comes with you, and what does not
Data that has already been written into Health is on your phone. It stays there whether or not you keep paying for the thing that produced it, and whether or not you keep wearing that device.
What does not come with you is anything a service worked out and kept on its own side: proprietary scores, readiness numbers, processed metrics that were never written into Health in the first place. If those matter to you, request them from the service while you still have an account.
When you set up something new, check what it writes into Health rather than assuming. Not every device writes everything, and the gap is easier to fix on day one than a year later.
Steps verified against Apple's iPhone User Guide (iOS 26) and the Apple Platform Security guide, July 2026. Apple changes its interface from time to time, so if a screen does not match, the wording here is what Apple documented at the time of writing.