Sandman
Since the topic was data loss, are you here claiming that this internal "switch" failing also made your phone backup fail? Or are you saying that in spite of your iPhone explictly asking you to, and Apple providing it for free, you declined automatic backup of your phone?

Because if you didn't decline, and you had backup, then your replacement iPhone would just ask for your iCloud credentials and then just restore your new phone with all the data from your old phone.

So regardless of this "internal switch" whatever that is supposed to mean, your phone data - while unrecoverable inside your old phone - was not actually lost since you're smart enough to utilize the automatic and free of charge backup mechanism in iCloud (or the automatic free of charge backup mechanism in iTunes if you distrust the cloud).

PeterN
I apologize to you for my snippy answers. I thought I was responding to nosense, and sent before review.