iOS5 update fail

[afuna]

Updated to iOS5, and I've basically lost all data from apps that aren't official Apple apps.

That just takes all the fun out of it :-(

Comments

[thorfinn]

:-/ crapola. So the phone is up with a connect to iTunes screen?

Which "restore" are you using? There's two - and they're apparently different. Restore from the Summary screen restores the full OS... ctrl-click restore on the phone's name in iTunes just restores the backup.

Apparently doing the second one after a partial failure of the first one can work...

[afuna]

I've been doing the first and then the second -- though it did take me a while to find the second. It turns out that when it says "connect to itunes", it means "connect to itunes and then resume from there", rather than "connect to itunes and continue from the device's screen" *facepalm*

Not so intuitive an action when your device is already connected to itunes -- but it looks like being stuck at the connect to itunes step was unintuitive interface user error.

I'm currently restoring from backup, and I hope it will work! It just failed because I didn't have enough free space to backup the device on my laptop. It looks like itunes keeps the previous backup around while backing up the latest data, instead of overriding the old backup with the newer one at once -- which is good in principle, but screwed me over this once >_<

[thorfinn]

Heh, I'm with you on unintuitive interface. :-) Good luck with the restore!

[afuna]

Damn, it 's still saying that the backup was either incomplete or incompatible.

And I can't restore to an earlier version of iOS to try to restore and back up from there because apple won't let me *swears*

[thorfinn]

Crapola. :-/ Was your backup encrypted? ISTR it might be possible to go manually digging around in the backup directories and, um, reconstruct one manually. There's approximately a billion caveats and potential issues with that, but aiee. Slightly easier if the backup isn't encrypted, but I think there are still ways around it if it is.

[afuna]

No it wasn't -- I can't seem to find any info on reconstructing a backup (though I'm aware where the backup lives). Do you think there might be somehow a way to re-import all the data and preferences, or is it more of having the files on hand and being able to type stuff in manually?

I did just take stock of my data, though, and besides one expense-tracking app, and that one I think I found and I think I can re-upload a db file for, I didn't lose a lot of personal data.

i.e., all my photos on my ipad were from outside sources, videos ditto. I did have some notes but these were mostly travel notes and it sucks to have lost them but they weren't work-related or valuable, etc.

But on the other hand, I use Dropbox for viewing notes, and iBooks has separate syncing, and my music too appears to be preserved in iTunes, and

I've spent the entire afternoon wrestling with this, including trying to downgrade to an earlier version of my backups so I could restore onto the device the older backups I snagged from Time Machine, back up once more using iTunes, and then try the upgrade process again. (I dunno maybe it might have worked!) but I can't get work past the restrictions apple put up wrt signing their .ipsw files. Ugh.

Right now I'm just -- resigned. Pissed off, but mostly resigned as well :-(

[thorfinn]

The "backup", such as it is, is a directory of directories of files, some of which are SQLite databases, essentially.

So it would be possible to go digging around through older time machine backups and newer ones and cobble together a franken-backup...

I'm not sure I'd be game to go to the effort of trying to poke into the completely undocumented under-the-hood details, it's probably easier to just manually try and restore data in other ways. :-/