New phone coming, new watch coming - Best migration path?

Hi All,
Looking for some thinking on migration please,
to ensure I don’t lose 5 years of health data
from existing phone and watch.

My plan:

  1. Unpair existing watch from existing phone.
  2. Set up new phone AS A NEW PHONE
    (I always do this with new devices)
  3. Set up new watch to new phone

Will the health data sync with new phone
(and watch) or do I need to restore a backup?

Any guidance appreciated.

Earlier this year I upgraded from a 5S to a 14 but before the upgrade started I exported all the data from Apple Health just in case. Also made sure that there was a backup of the 5S on iCloud. There was no need to worry as the moment the new phone logged into iCloud the backup was restored including all the Health data.

Health data that since I bought an Apple Watch 9 has been growing at an asronishing rate. Did a recent export of all the data and it came out as 90Mb!; the export is for me to start planning how to analyse all the stuff in a better way than the one-by-one display of Apple Health on either my iPhone or iPad.

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What benefit are you getting by not migrating from the current phone?

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All Health Data is held in iCloud as well as locally now (if you don’t switch it off) that’s how you can see Health Data on an iPad.

There should be no need to do anything special. Ignore your old devices, setup your new phone and watch and it should all sync across.

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I like to eliminate the possibility of transferring any “cruft”
to a new device. My approach has always been that new
hardware starts fresh, any major sfw versions are installed
on newly formatted media. Minors and patches are incremental.

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