Do markers survive a full backup and restore on iPhone?

Getting a new phone is exactly the moment you find out which parts of an app's library actually travel on their own. A marker is a reasonable thing to wonder about specifically — tapping the flag felt like it saved something in the moment, so it is fair to expect that something to still be there once the rest of the library has been restored.

What a marker actually is

A marker is a timestamp, not a note. Tap the flag while a recording is running and the app remembers one thing: a position in seconds from the start of that file. It shows up as a line on the waveform, and tapping the line later jumps playback straight there. There is no text attached to it and nothing to read on its own — its entire job is getting you back to an exact second without making you scrub for it.

What actually goes into a backup

A full backup is one JSON file with every recording's title, date, duration and transcript, built to bring a library back onto another phone in a single file. That list is deliberately short — four fields, chosen because they are what "restore my library" actually needs, not because they happened to be everything the app had lying around. A marker's position is not one of the four, for much the same reason a marker was never text-shaped to begin with: there is nowhere natural in a record of titles and transcripts for "at four minutes twelve seconds" to attach to, once the audio it points into is not part of the same file.

Why moving the audio file itself does not help either

The other half of a restore is separate from the backup: each recording's .m4a moves on its own, through the ordinary share sheet, exactly as it was recorded. It is tempting to assume that if the audio makes the trip, whatever was pinned to it makes the trip too. It does not, because a marker was never inside the file in the first place. An .m4a is a standard audio format, and nothing about AAC has a slot set aside for "here is a moment a listener cared about." A marker's position lives in the app's own record of that recording, on the phone that made it — and that is precisely what a plain audio file does not carry with it when it moves.

So the answer is straightforward

Neither half of a restore is built to carry a marker, so the honest answer is no — a marker dropped on the old phone does not reappear on the new one, whichever route brings the rest of the library across. That is not a bug waiting on a fix; it follows directly from what each piece is actually built to move. A backup was built to bring transcripts back. An audio share was built to bring sound back. Neither one was ever built to bring a bookmark back, because a bookmark only means something next to a version of the recording that still remembers where it points.

What you do not actually lose

The part markers exist to protect — being able to find a moment again — mostly survives anyway, just by a different route. The transcript restores in full, as text, and text is searchable. If what a marker pointed at was something someone said, searching the restored transcript for a word from that part of the conversation gets you back to roughly the same place a marker would have, just by reading instead of tapping a line on a waveform. What genuinely does not come back is the one-tap jump straight into the audio at that instant — once the sound itself has been moved across too, finding that exact second again means listening or scrubbing for it, the same as any recording that was never marked at all.

If a marker matters to you, this is worth doing before you switch

• Before backing up, open the recordings whose markers you would actually miss and skim to what each one points at.
• Where it matters, put a word or two about it in the recording's title, or add it into the transcript itself — both of those are text, and text is exactly what a backup and a transcript export both carry.
• Do this while the old phone still has the original recording to check against. A marker only means something next to the audio it points into, and once that phone is out of reach there is nothing left to verify it against.

This is not worth doing for every marker in a large library — most of them were never going to matter again anyway, which is part of why tapping a flag in the moment is supposed to be cheap. It is worth doing selectively, for the handful you would genuinely go looking for once you are on the new phone.

How Voice Studio handles this

A marker in Voice Studio is a timestamp on that recording's waveform, saved in the app's own storage alongside everything else about it — nothing about placing or using one touches an account or a server, because there is not one. The full backup in Settings is one JSON file of every recording's title, date, duration and transcript, built to restore a library onto another phone; markers are not one of its fields, the same way they are not part of a TXT or JSON transcript export either. Moving a recording's .m4a across, through the ordinary share sheet, carries the sound exactly as recorded and nothing else. If a marker matters enough to want it on the new phone, writing what it pointed at into the title or the transcript before you back up is how to carry it across — as words, which is the one thing every export and backup here genuinely moves.

Common questions

Does restoring a full backup bring markers back along with the transcript?

No. The backup carries each recording's title, date, duration and transcript — four fields, and a marker's position is not one of them. The transcript restores in full; the lines on the waveform do not.

If I move the .m4a file to the new phone separately, do the markers come with it?

No. A marker was never encoded into the audio file itself — it is a timestamp the app kept in its own record of that recording. An .m4a moved through the share sheet is the sound alone, exactly as recorded, with nothing about markers attached to it.

Is there any way to preserve a marker's position before switching phones?

Not the marker itself, but what it points at usually is preservable — put a word or two about the moment into the recording's title or the transcript before you back up. Both are text, and text is what the backup and the transcript export both carry.

If markers do not survive a restore, is there any point using them at all?

Yes, on the phone you made them on. A marker's whole job is getting you back to a moment without scrubbing, and it does that job well for as long as the recording lives on that device. It was never meant to be a permanent record on its own — the transcript is what serves that role, and the transcript is what travels.