Be Excellent To Each Other

My phone is knackered, so I backed it up, wiped it, and went to get a replacement.

Carphone Warehouse are absolute cretins who hate their customers and will never get any more trade from me ever, so I still have my broken phone (the battery has burst, so it only works when plugged in to a power supply).

So I go to restore my phone from backup.

Apparently it needs a password. I did not set a password on it. I have googled around and tried the current lock code, every lock code I have ever set on it, every password I have ever used for pretty much anything, and then some, including the admin password for my computer (which is what the internet says is the right answer, and seems to be right since the OK button has the little admin shield thing on it, but sadly it doesn't work).

So, anyone have any ideas how to restore from a backup? It appears to be able to restore other phone backups to it (I just restored an old one from my previous phone) without a password, so why the one I just did today?

So angry. Grrrrr!

1) If you have encrypted backups set up in iTunes, then you definitely gave it a password at some point in the past.
2) Have you tried restoring from iCloud instead?
3) Your less-than-one-year-old phone has suffered a hardware fault. Your statutory rights under the Sales Of Goods Act could not be more clear; you are entitled to a repair, replacement or refund at no cost to yourself.

1) I don't, and if I had, it would be the one of the many I tried. I googled at it seems that it often needs your administrator password from that PC, but that doesn't even work.
2) No. Might give it a whirl, but it won't have most of the things I need. I don't pay for the service, so it wouldn't restore half of what I want.
3) Yes, but my options are:
a) Give phone to Carphone Warehouse. They send it to Apple themselves, it takes two weeks to get back either mended or a new one. I get it replaced, but I'm still without a phone for two weeks. Not great.
b) Ignore CW and book an appointment at Apple, whereby they fix/replace it when I visit. Earliest appointments are Thu/Fri this week and mean I have to trek to Regents Street after work. Then I'm relying on them actually doing it all for free, which I hope they will but who fucking knows, frankly. Not ideal, though slightly better than dealing with CW.

The people at CW were unbelievably unhelpful, and actually went out of their way to be obstructive against what it says on their website. Fucked if I will ever use them again. Spectacular assholes.

I have a spare iPhone 5 you could borrow if you need to bridge the gap during a repair.

Apple would be legally entitled to tell you to bugger off, although I'd be surprised if they did.

iCloud backups are capped at 5 GB on the free tier, but that space excludes all your apps (as they can just reinstall) so it goes a lot further than you might think; it's pretty much only photos, videos, and app data. I have my iPhone and my iPad fully backed up into the free space. In any event, you've nothing to lose by restoring it and seeing where you end up. You can always factory reset again and you'll be back where you are right now.

The password thing is a puzzler but it's been many years since I touched iTunes on Windows, so I'm not best placed to help with that bit.