Q: Updated to iOs5 lost everything! Help?

I'll be totally honest, it was a a close my eyes and press the button situation. For me it worked. I'm not going to tell you to do it, cos if it went tits up, you'd be blaming me.

I just found that whenever i pressed "update" (or whatever the middle option was) it kept on screwing up. So i decided to press cancel, and the rest is history. It was annoying cos it would cancel the sync (5,500 songs) about 300 songs short. So i'd have to spend another few hours putting everything on.

Hope it goes well for you.

Thank you very much for your quick reply

I'll wait and see if people with more guts than me are having the same results as you.

Meanwhile I'll stick to the press cancel button situation

Hi, if you go to itunes Preferences, then 'devices' you can see how many backups you have and what dates the back ups are from. There you can delete any back up you choose. but be careful not to delete the latest 'full' sync. If your last sync was interupted that would be the one to delete. Make sure you have another back before deleting anything.

While in preferences go to 'Advance' and you can reset 'warnings' and 'empty cache'. Turn your phone off, then reboot. Then sync. Let me lknnow how you go with this. Hope it helps

Himiona

Thank you,

I have two backups in the list, the upper one is the latest i've done whilst the second one is the one that was interrupted.

How do I know if the latest back is actually a full sync? -so to delete the corrupted-

I don't get the last procedure you explain in your post, what is it for?

Thank you in advance

you may not need to delete any back up. also, I deleted music off my phone to clear space before i synced. Just so there was plenty of space. I then added music after and re-synced. i hope this helps.

Sorry i didn't make myself clear, my iPhone is working fine, it is just that I had serious trouble during the restore process after the update --> that's why I've got the corrupted backup (and a recent one) and the annoying itunes message

Can I erase that problematic backup without having problems?

Thank you once again

I found a solution! Having regretted the decision to update (from an iphone 3GS) to ios 5 I was left as well with the fact that despite a backup in itunes and the transfer of purchases all apps and music files were gone nevertheless?!

I seem to have found, by pure accident, all music files as well as the apps - which seem to be invisibly filed there - when importing all archives of my music files (in Windows 7) at C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music.

I went to itunes/mediathek (that´s the name in German up in in the very left corner) and activated the command "import all files of archive ..." and suddenly there were as well all my 60+ apps back in itunes?!

I am currently synchronizing itunes with my iphone which seems to take quite a while but hope is that it seems to work.

How the **** did Apple not get this basic functionality of synchronisation perfect before releasiing this ios5?! Their myth and legend has definitely gone, seems that they have become too big to bother too much.

I am home recovering from surgery and decided to load ios5 onto my 3GS.  I have lost my contacts, photos, game scores and all of my texts.  I have had this happen before so I made sure to back up my phone BEFORE ios 5 but that back up is nowhere to be found.  There are thousands of similiar complaints all over the internet.  We have 4 iphones and 2 ipads, but this will be the thing that makes me ditch apple for good.  There is always a glitch!!!!

Yes that should be fine

I deleted the corrupted backup with no problems whatsoever. But the message keeps appearing.

I reseted warnings but after relaunching itunes it displays  a message saying "there has been an error while processing your directive"

Any ideas?

Thank you

I had a bad feeling about updating to ios5, and now I wish I had kept the previous version. The only reason was so that would save some pocket change on text messages, but for pocket change I would prefer to have back the video of my sister on her birthday. Then again, how lazy am I to not have transferred it to a more reliable place of storage? Hopefully this will be the last time I will have to learn the lesson of backup your data before trying anything funny. Or better, backup your data, period.

I got the "restore did not complete error -50" message.

I read all 9 pages of this topic and tried most all of the suggestions to get my photos and videos back. It turns out that after 3 hours I found the folder with the backups and went through the one that was supposed to be from the time right before I updated to ios5, searched through it looking for the lost photos/videos, found about 5 recent videos (not the one of my sister unfortunately), and discovered that the most recent photos were unable to be read. Then I saw in itunes when I right-clicked to do a 'restore from backup' on my iphone, the one that was listed was TITLED NOV 4 (when I updated), but then next to it it said, "last backed up on sept 24". So somehow it used my sept 24 backup as my Nov 4 backup. So I went and deleted the actual sept 24 backup from the C:\documents and settings\user\application data\apple computer\mobile sync\backup\ folder. Then I returned to itunes and chose to restore from the backup which was created on nov 4. This time I got a different error, saying that the backup file was corrupted. Alas, I believe I have reached the end of this road and the conclusion is that while I was able to hunt down a few of my missing videos, ultimately the backup did not complete successfully before updating to ios5. I wish Apple would have done their part to ensure safe updating. Or to write the program so that there would be a check to make sure the backup is secure before continuing with the update. The good news is that something like this only has to happen once because now we have all learned our lesson. I consider this partly my fault because I should have known better than to trust technology with my precious memories!

I recommend that you look through the backup folders stored in the address I wrote above, and find as many photos/videos as you can. Other than this, I believe the best we can do is chalk it up to the learning process.

Why do you guys put up with this cr*p from Apple? iPhone user since Dec 09 and i've had nothing but trouble since day one, I'm just pleased that my phone contract is up very soon.

Apple apparently stand for simplicity. In my experience the exact opposite is true. Apple products are sadly missing effortless usability, their software (iTunes) is an absolute car crash that lost and devoured 2TB of my music that I spent months re-sorting. Warning messages that pop-up on their devices and in their software make no sense whatsover and you have to second guess what Apple really meant to say. Nothing is spelled out in ABC fashion. My mum could never do this update if she lived another 500 years. Thats not simplicity, all i want is full control, I want to go to my computer see the device and handle manually, thats it!

I haven't used Apple devices or software on a Mac but i know for sure they are not made for PC, Period!

I have used the iPad for a few weeks and this also was not user-friendly in my experience, to many second guesses and errors.

This is my conclusion:

Apple is essentially a marketing company that just happen to sell pretty looking products. They ellicit control of their customers to ultimately boost their bank balance. Its all about control and getting you to spend ridiculous amounts of money with them. Buying from Apple is not a win-win deal. The required time investment required just to operate and update their devices and software far outweighs the monetary investment with little to show in return.

I'm going Android Phone and Kindle Fire from next month. I wish you all the best with your future stress levels and health... not forgetting the lost time you will never get back!

well, here is what i found out...

I updated my iphone 4s this morning to ios5 and lost everything... heart attack was on its way... So here is what i tried and actually worked..

i opened the itunes app window and located my device on the left column... right click and select restore from back up... select the right back up snd press restore button... wait just a little while and... oops! all contacts, mails, texts and ios5 are there on my I phone!!! Hope this is helpful!

elenaman, color yourself as lucky! I, and I see, many others, attempted exactly what you were able to do, and either received an error message (-50), or a statement that the back-up was corrupt! Even when a back-up date was selected, which pre-dated the iOs5 update, it gave the same results. Since I no longer have my 3g phone, I have ordered a 3g SIM card reader, attempting to recover info from that sim!

same here although I somehow managed to set up an icloud back up file so I have managed to import  the contacts, but all my music has disappeared. When I connect my iphone to my pc the devices section doesn't show up iniTunes so I can't download my iTunes library or the apps. If I go to the store on my phone, then I can redownload anything I've bought from iTunes, but can't seem to move burnt cds and other downloads.... going bonkers trying to sort this out - ANY help gratefully appreciated...!!