Q: Updating a new iPad Pro 9.7 from and iPad Mini

I have an old iPad Mini (the Mini) and a new one, an iPad Pro 9.7 (Pro).  I have 185 pdf books, manuals etc on the Mini and I am trying to update the Pro.  In the past two weeks, I have spent over 4 hours with Apple support on the phone to no avail.  The first bout lasted about 2 hours and it appeared that the Pro was being updated properly.  A week later when I went looking for a pdf that I thought had been transferred, I was unable to find it.  That is when I discovered that only 74 of the 185 had been transferred properly.

The basic approach was to backup the Mini to iTunes and then restore this backup to the Pro.  It obviously didn't work.  I then called Apple Support a second time and we basically went through the same process.  Backup the Mini to iTunes and then restore this backup to the Pro.  All 185 pdfs were backed up properly to my desktop (Win 8.1), but when this backup was restored to the Pro, only 74 of the 185 came over.  The Apple support person and I never did get this to work.  So now I have to find out which ones were not restored  and restore each one of them individually - 111 pdf files.

This situation is TOTALLY unacceptable.  A couple of years ago, when I bought a new desktop, it was a simple matter to move the "old" stuff to the new computer using a simple transfer program running on both machines and a special transfer cable to connect the two computers.  Why I cannot get this transfer to work using Apple's own programs, I do not know.

Most of my opinions about Apple and their so-called "user friendly" stuff are unprintable and really unfit to repeat in polite company.

I am hoping that someone reading this can shed some light on a solution to this problem, other than what appears to be the only solution so far.  Finding the missing pdfs and getting them onto my Pro is going to take an inordinate amount of time.  Time I would rather spend pursuing my favourite hobby - photography.  Not only that, even though I am retired, I still have a lot of things to do other than my photography.