madlock

Q: iPhone 6s/iOS 9.3.5 Backup/Restore/Sync Confusion

I recently needed to Backup, Erase and Restore my 6s Plus to unlock it from the carrier.

 

I downloaded iTunes to my laptop and performed a tethered backup through iTunes and also an iCloud backup over Wi-Fi to help ensure against corruption.  According to the acknowledgement messages, both eventually completed successfully.

 

I erased and reset the iPhone and attempted to restore it from the iTunes backup on my PC.  Upon completion I received a message stating that certain items could not be restored from the backup and would require syncing.

 

Hoping to achieve a "clean" restore, I erased and reset the phone again and attempted to restore it over Wi-Fi, a process I admit to not fully understanding since it doesn't seem to be a discrete process.  It seems to restore a portion of the phone and settings and the remainder continues to download over the subsequent few hours.

 

Hoping to "sync" my way out of the lengthy time requirement by tethering it to the PC and syncing the purchased and other content which iTunes transferred to my PC during the backup process.  Despite my PC containing all of the phone's content in the iTunes library folders, syncing results in a message stating that the phone has been synced to another iTunes library on a different PC which no longer exists.

 

I can't be the first person to question why the iPhone and iTunes don't automatically update to recognize each other as current given that the entire purpose for syncing phone was to restore the phone and content to the same state after unlocking it from the carrier.  I don't want to delete any content that's been saved to my computer, corrupt the iTunes library or lose any media content which was backed up and restored but now exists nowhere else.

 

Am I uniquely stupid?  Surely others have encountered similar frustrations and people smarter than me have discovered how to work within Apple's arcane procedures.  I'd be grateful for any helpful guidance that will assist me in getting my phone back to where it was just a few hours ago before unlocking it from the carrier.  They sure don't warn you of this potential downside - or I never would've bothered.

 

Many thanks in advance to all who offer useful assistance.

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.3.5

Posted on Sep 12, 2016 7:28 AM

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Q: iPhone 6s/iOS 9.3.5 Backup/Restore/Sync Confusion

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  • by madlock,

    madlock madlock Sep 12, 2016 8:12 PM in response to Demo
    Level 1 (11 points)
    Apple Pay
    Sep 12, 2016 8:12 PM in response to Demo

    Please don't presume anything I've done to be rational.  I'm an admitted idiot's idiot when it comes to this stuff. 

     

    I had initiated a restore of the old backup from the old laptop and, because it already was so far along into a process that already had taken so long, I decided to see where it lead me with the hope that it would cause the relevant app being restored and expecting the phone data to be nine months old.  If successful, I figured I could make a full backup from that point with the proper settings enabled at least to ensure I could get past what seemed like the most insurmountable obstacle (recovering the lost app) when I started out.  I then would have a state I knew I could fall back upon if I were to try other options later.

     

    Except for having the current iOS (9.3.5) which surprised me, restoring the phone basically gave me my phone as it was last November, needing about 90 app updates.  The initial sync (which did not include media files) restored the missing app which had read "Will Install" within iTunes.  I am in the process of backing up the phone now to have a failsafe position to fall back upon.

     

    My goal now is to restore the phone from the more current backup which I hope will give me back all of my pictures, lost SMS conversations, iBooks PDFs and so forth, which I will do from my newer PC after copying the .ipa to iTunes.  In fact, I copied (imported by dragging) all of the .ipa files I could find into iTunes with the hope of preserving any other apps that I may have lost without noticing.

     

    From there, I'd like to be able to fully sync the phone with my new PC.  To do so, I figure I'm going to need to answer "Ok" to the prompt that advises that the phone has been synced elsewhere and proceeding will nuke whatever already exists.  Before doing so, I plan to consolidate all of my media to an external drive which I then plan to re-import into iTunes before syncing again for a final time to put all the media I want back onto the phone (stuff I can't redownload from the cloud or iTunes in particular).

     

    Does this seem to be a sensible way to proceed?

     

    I can't thank you enough for your help.

  • by Demo,

    Demo Demo Sep 13, 2016 3:36 AM in response to madlock
    Level 10 (95,476 points)
    iPad
    Sep 13, 2016 3:36 AM in response to madlock

    Everything you have done and plan to do makes sense to me but you still have me a little confused about what you are calling your media files. If you are talking about music, movies, books and so on, I assumed that all of that content would already be in the new syncing computer, unless the new computer is exactly that - brand new and without all of your iTunes content. If it is, the importing the iTunes library is the way to go.

     

    You will get the message that the phone was synced with a different computer when you first sync with the "new" computer, but if the "new" computer contains all of your media and your backup, you will be fine. That is what you want to accomplish, correct?

  • by madlock,

    madlock madlock Sep 18, 2016 4:59 PM in response to madlock
    Level 1 (11 points)
    Apple Pay
    Sep 18, 2016 4:59 PM in response to madlock

    I just wanted to circle back to thank everybody for their help and support.  I indeed was able to recover my phone to a backup dated 9/11/2016 without losing the app that disappeared.  I can't explain how grateful I am.

     

    I now merely need to find a way to restore the week of activity I conducted under the old backup from late 2015 because I didn't have the bandwidth to do it sooner.  I've made a differential backup based upon the old restore that should include the data from 9/12-9/18 which I hope to overlay onto the phone as it was restored from the 9/11 backup to yield a cobbled together superset of all the content and data I hope to retain.

     

    From there, i hope to proceed to iOS10 and backup the whole shebang once more before tackling the "erase and replace" consolidation of libraries which I pretty much plan to achieve by pulling all the media I can from the phone and consoliting it off-line which I then will reimport into iTunes and resync to the freshly-associated phone.

     

    WIth all that to look forward to, thanks again to everybody who helped me recover what I feared i couldn't undo.

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