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Back up account credentials in Microsoft Authenticator - Microsoft Support
Restore account credentials from Microsoft Authe...
Updated Mar 26, 2025
Version 9.0
Blog Post
Recovery doesn’t work on iOS. Restored an iOS device a few months ago, and just transferred to a new iphone. Both times the “start recovery” process failed complaining that no iCloud backup existed. Triple-checked backup was on and up to date before proceeding both times.
From the logs it looks like the app is deleting the backup on first run when it detects no account signed in.
2021-09-24 21:21:20.750 VERB PhoneFactor 0 TID=13 219 (updateCloudBackupIfNeeded()) There is MSA backup metadata, but the MSA account is gone. Delete backup.
2021-09-24 21:21:20.750 VERB PhoneFactor 0 TID=13 148 (deleteBackup(backupName:completionHandler:errorHandler:)) Deleting backup with name Backup
2021-09-24 21:21:20.751 VERB PhoneFactor 0 TID=13 113 (delete(containerIdentifier:completionHandler:errorHandler:)) Deleting a CloudKitContainer with name:Backup type:MicrosoftAuthenticatorBackup from the CloudKit storage.
Submitted a ticket through the App, hopefully someone is looking into this, but I’d say it’s not been working for several months.