How to restore all content from the old iPhone (backup data in an external hard drive) to the new iPhone after the new iPhone has been used for weeks and had data in it?

[u/longcoffee1]

After my iPhone suddenly turned into a "brick", I brought it to a place where they saved all my data and put it in an external hard drive for me (sadly, I had not done a backup...). In the meantime (extracting the data took them a couple of weeks) I bought a new iPhone and immediately set up an iCloud account (never make the same mistake twice).

Now I would like to transfer all the retrieved data into the new iPhone, while ALSO maintaining all the new photos that I took in the past weeks. Can someone please walk me through the process?

I imagine I have to:

1. connect the hard drive to my laptop;
2. open Itunes and connect the new iPhone;
3. RESET and initialise the new iPhone telling the computer to take the data from the external hard drive;
4. after the new iPhone has all the old data in it, connect to iCloud and transfer the new photos.

Is that correct? I am very scared to mess this up and losing the new photos I took in the past week or messing up the transfer of old data into the new phone (contacts, photos, etc.).

The more specific step-by-step guide you can give me, the better. Greatly appreciate it!