Do note that restoring your phone can be a massive pain, even on a fast network it took me a couple of hours to fully restore it. There's also certain things you'll need to set up again; Apple Pay, mail passwords, ... So it's really not as simple as you make it out to be.

I wish I could

- backup essentials to iCloud

- and backup pretty much everything (whatever I want) to iTunes so that I could do a full restore from a local backup.

I'm genuinely curious; why is cloud storage considered to be a solution here?

When I put my 'megalomania cap' on, one of the first things I do is figure that people will use the cloud, which actually makes me happy. I won't have to worry about notifications, in-person confrontations and/or low-level employee error.

Same for people opting to ship their devices abroad via FedEx and the like to avoid the hassle of wiping and/or being searched.

As far as I can tell (from reading history and living), companies, no matter how beneficent they claim to be, acquiesce to "gov't" demands because the penalty of not doing so is death. Recent case in point, Google in the PRC.

But again, I fully admit that I may be wrong here. So, if I am, I hope someone will take the time to explain why. Thanks.

I'm sure you won't get any extra attention if you show them a freshly wiped phone, totally normal.

Unfortunately I think you'd have to have the phone activated with a different Apple account. But if they ask you questions (like "do you have any other icloud accounts") don't lie, it never makes it better. Just say that this is your travel account. This is now quite standard practice for execs when travelling to e.g. China.

This is good advice but practitioners should be advised that iOS data backed up to iCloud can be decrypted by Apple and, as a result, is subject to subpoena by the authorities.

Attorney here! (Not giving legal advice.)

The good news is that, at least in the U.S., a warrant (not a subpoena, that’s for civil matters) needs to be issued by a judge and can issue only if probable cause is provided. That’s a much higher standard than a border search, where no such limitations apply.

Let’s be real. The law allows them sufficient room to detain people that they’ll just threaten to make life hard for you if you don’t do things the easy way.

The law is a post-facto thing which you can use to sue if you want to lose some years of your life. It never actually helps prevent a bad situation. And to make it worse you’ll probably effectively be banned from traveling for being a troublemaker.

This can be made easier with a secondary discardable-grade phone with the same O/S as your primary phone.

Do factory reset and cross the border. Then just sign in to your travel phone just like you did when you bought it and switched on for the first time, and it pulls all apps/messages/passwords from the cloud. You'll get at least 95% of your real phone synced to the travel phone.

Back at home, your real phone is untouched and you can just switch back to it without having to set up anything, or losing any local settings. Then stash the travel phone until the next trip.

I've got an old iPhone 5 burner I use for international travel. It's a slight hassle but I'd rather that than someone going through all my texts, emails and pics etc.