Could not restore iPhone after 7.1.2 update

Question

Could not restore iPhone after 7.1.2 update

As a number of other people have posted here, I've encountered some problems with the iOS 7.1.2 update on my iPhone. Unlike most of the others, I've tried a number of possible solutions before resorting to asking here, and I have details of my efforts to share. My experience with this problem over the past twenty-four hours suggests that the standard advice I'm seeing given is insufficient for those of us having this issue.

This started around 1 am EDT last night (this morning) when I did a standard sync of my 16 GB iPhone 4 in iTunes 11.2.2 in order to install a couple of newly updated apps. I will point out up front that it was not my intention to update to 7.1.2—I was still on iOS 7.1.1 and intended to remain there until I'd seen reports of others' experiences with the update. (I've been burned before by issues with an iOS update, and I tend to be cautious about them now, as it is a one-way trip.) In fact, my iTunes had not yet notified me of the 7.1.2 update; I knew of it from it having appeared as a notification on my phone itself.

At the end of the sync, however, iTunes told me that it could not install one of my updated apps because there was not enough space. I normally try to keep about 1 GB free, so this seemed odd, especially considering that I had not added anything sizeable since my last sync earlier in the day. I was surprised to see that iTunes reported only 300 MB free on my iPhone. The culprit appeared to be the opaque "Other" category, which had since the prior sync ballooned from less than 1.8 GB to nearly 2.5 GB for no apparent reason.

(Side note: Apple's insistence on not defining the contents of "Other" to users and not providing any reasonable means of cleaning it out continues to be an issue, which is compounded by its tendency to grow over time. Is it too much to ask that some housekeeping be enabled for this?)

I have in the past had fairly consistent luck with purging old, outdated data from "Other" by doing a full reset and restore on my iPhone, so I set out to do this. Unfortunately, iTunes downloaded and installed iOS 7.1.2 instead of the installed 7.1.1, and I had no opportunity to change that. I was annoyed by this—a system reset should not force an OS update—but I didn't expect any significant problem from it.

Once the reset completed, I got my first sign of real trouble: an error saying that my iPhone "could not be activated" and that I needed to call Apple. As it was roughly 2 am EDT by then, this was not an option at the time. After I accepted that error message, however, iTunes showed my phone with its correct name and information, and began the process of restoring the last backup (which had been made during that sync attempt an hour earlier). After several minutes, I got another error message saying that this backup could not be restored because it was "corrupt" or "incompatible".

I was, at this point, prepared to simply accept that I would have to redo everything, and so started setting things up in iTunes so that I could pack it up and go to bed. I soon discovered, to my dismay, that while iTunes gave no indication that anything was wrong with my phone at this point, the phone itself was stuck on the pre-activation screens, demanding to be connected to iTunes to complete activation. iTunes itself revealed no options I could readily locate for initiating activation manually, and if I proceeded through the setup screens on the iPhone for the option of restoring from a backup, I simply ended up back where I was before after several minutes, with the phone demanding it be connected and iTunes saying the backup couldn't be restored.

I gave up around 5 am EDT and went to bed. Later this morning I tried working with it some more. This time, I retrieved several of the last few days' mobile backups from my Time Machine backup (from ~/Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/Backup, using Tri-Edre's Back-in-Time) and fed them into the phone, but each one returned the same "corrupt or incompatible" error. This included backups dating as far back as a week ago, prior to 7.1.2 becoming available.

At this point I tried running setup on the iPhone as a new device. Fortunately, all the key information is tied to my Apple ID, so it was suitably reactivated with my carrier, and it knew which apps, music tracks, videos, pictures, and books were to be synced to it, so I didn't have to manually re-add them all. But it of course does not have any previous settings or local data stored, and my 178 apps that had been meticulously arranged into folders were now spread across 12 pages in alphabetical order. I'm still slowly going through everything to reset those missing settings and folder structure.

Ultimately, I haven't lost anything of real importance besides time. Besides my iTunes backups, all my "real" data is kept in apps that sync with their OS X counterparts in some form (like Evernote and Dropbox). I had recently downloaded photos, so I have not lost any of those either, though since I don't save them to iCloud (for several reasons), those which I had retained on the phone in Albums are no longer there and will need to be re-collected and synced. Primarily, the only things that appear to be irretrievably lost are my call and SMS logs (iMessage history is still in OS X Messages, and voice mails are stored by my carrier), and saved data from games that don't link to Game Center. Not a big loss, to be sure—I'm still weighing whether it's worth paying the $50 to register iBackup Viewer Pro, which appears to be the only tool which claims to be able to extract data from encrypted iOS backups, in order to restore that data to the iPhone.

My purpose in posting this, then, is not to ask for solutions to get my phone useable again—I already have that—but rather two other things. First, I wanted to present as much detail as I could about this issue to the community, since the other threads I've found here asking about this problem have yet to get past the initial "reset and restore from backup" advice, and my experience indicates that this isn't necessarily going to help, but resetting and setting up as a new device, then resyncing with your Apple ID/iCloud/iTunes can at least make the device functional again. I'll also point out that unless you encrypt your backups (which I do, because, well, duh), there are several utilities available, some of which are completely free, that can extract your data from your backups. Some of them even claim to be able to return that data directly back to the device. Given that this "corrupt or incompatible" error appears to not be stating the situation accurately, it's likely that your data is still intact in your backup despite the error message—iTunes just can't restore it directly to the device. (If you do encrypt your backups, the only utility I've found that claims it can extract anything from them is the aforementioned $50 iBackup Viewer Pro.)

Second, I want to find out where this problem comes from: I had at first assumed that the "incompatible" message came from having a later version of iOS on the phone than had been present on the backups (though the official line has always been that while you could not restore a backup to an older iOS, there shouldn't be an issue with restoring to a newer one), but what I've seen on this forum indicates that this seems to be a problem in 7.1.2 itself being unable, in at least some cases, to accept backups from a previous iOS. Is this a viable hypothesis, or is there another factor at work here? If it is something specific to 7.1.2, is fixing it a priority?

Posted on Jul 3, 2014 8:17 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jul 7, 2014 12:34 AM in response to MarquelleDavianMcKean

I am having a similar problem: I backup up my 16 GB iPhone 4, set it to update from 7.1.1 to 7.1.2 via iTunes, and the update was very slow, then the progress bar stopped moving about 3/4 of the way across the screen. Restore to factory settings as an iOS 7.1.2 got me to a 'welcome to your new phone' screen, but an immediate attempt to restore from backup got about 90 percent of the progress bar, then a long hang, and activity monitor showed virtually nothing happening with iTunes, and even permitted me to quit iTunes with no 'your phone is restoring, please wait' sort of message. Now on 2nd attempt at Restore then Restore from backup, and things are going in a disturbingly similar way: first it says, Time Remaining 2 minutes, then 3 minutes, soon it will be 5 minutes, and then it will just stop. The phone just has a blue 'Restore in Progress' screen, with no progress bar, but Activity Monitor shows something happening with iTunes--still barely more CPU use than the dock. Who knows if this will work. But wow, worst update ever for bugginess/crashing on both update and Restore from backup. Restore as new is a world of pain that I really am not up for right now, but it looks like where I'm headed.

Perhaps this one should not have been labeled ok for iPhone 4.

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Answer 2

Jul 7, 2014 1:00 AM in response to Donot Haveone

And indeed, progress on restore from backup is again stalled--80-90% of the way across progress bar, and iTunes is barely registering on Activity Monitor--looks like nothing is happening for at least 10 minutes--nothing from iTunes, nothing from the phone.

The Restore in Progress screen on the phone showed a while, then there was a 'your settings have been restored, phone will show up in iTunes window after restore is complete' message on iTunes, then phone goes black and its back to Apple logo in white above progress bar, and this is stalled. iTunes now shows the phone again, 5GB of yellow 'other' only on the summary screen--no spinning sync icon, 'sync' button grayed out. Not looking good at all. Tomorrow I will be apparently be functionally phone-less and contact free. Might be liberating, who knows? Fortunately I have another alarm option.

Made an error in last post, BTW, mine is 32GB iPhone 4.

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Answer 3

fresy5tr

Level 1

0 points

Jul 7, 2014 7:16 PM in response to MarquelleDavianMcKean

Oh, your question is so long. It's easy to recover lost iPhone data as long as you've made a backup in iTunes before. And you can use Coolmuster Data Recovery for iPhone iPad iPod to help, it's easy to use.

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Answer 4

Ocean20

Level 6

13,727 points

Jul 7, 2014 7:41 PM in response to MarquelleDavianMcKean

tldnr

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Answer 5

Jul 7, 2014 9:12 PM in response to fresy5tr

Thanks for the suggestion of another program to try for extracting the backup's contents. Unfortunately, Coolmuster Data Recovery has the same limitation as the others I've tried (aside from the $50 iBackup Viewer Pro and the $35 Backuptrans iTunes Backup Extractor): it can't extract from encrypted backups.

I've found a handful of references around to ways to decrypt an encrypted backup, but they almost all are based on the assumption that you don't know the password and so require jailbreaking the device. The one I found that doesn't require a jailbreak is still really hack-intensive—I found it on a security professionals site—and so while I'm setting up to try it out now, I'm not going to link it here because it's complex enough and risky enough that someone who's not able to find the site themselves, and find and understand the instructions, probably shouldn't be trying it.

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Answer 6

Jul 7, 2014 9:39 PM in response to Ocean20

Pardon me for a moment while I (politely) rant in your general direction...

This type of response is not just unhelpful—it is the antithesis of helpful.

This is a support forum. Its purpose is helping to resolve people's problems. Sometimes those problems are going to require long explanations or lots of information. That either comes out in the original post or over the course of several back-and-forth replies; the former produces long posts but takes less time overall than the latter.

If you don't have the patience to read through a long post, then just move on. Posting a "too long, didn't read" comment adds nothing beneficial to anyone. All it does is reveal that the person who made that comment thinks it's important to tell everyone that their attention span is too short for anything longer than a tweet.

Yes, my post was long. Had you read it, you might have understood why it's so long. I'm trying to provide information that people searching these forums about this problem might find helpful. I did this because when I searched for info on this problem, I found lots of people with a similar problem, but no answers that went beyond "restore from backup". Since that advice wasn't the solution for me, I decided that more information might prompt someone with more knowledge and access than I have to investigate. Since you couldn't be bothered to read it, you clearly aren't the kind of person whose attention I was hoping to catch.

Certainly I could have made the post shorter, but I think putting it into a narrative like this makes it easier to follow and provides a context that a terse recitation of bare facts does not. If you disagree, that's your prerogative, but please don't waste everyone else's time by posting a comment just to say that you didn't read it.

I find it appalling that someone who's able to reach Level 6 on these support forums would post a "tldr" comment. That does not reflect positively on you or these forums.

End of rant.

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Answer 7

Jul 7, 2014 9:56 PM in response to Donot Haveone

It took quite a while, but the 2nd round through restore as new then restore from backup DID work--it just took a very long time, and if the original update to the software hadn't crashed, I wouldn't have had to do it. Really unpleasant experience all round. Still trying to restore--because of course restore from backup doesn't actually restore everything, just settings, and everything else still has to be reloaded.

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Answer 8

Jul 11, 2014 5:36 AM in response to MarquelleDavianMcKean

iOS 7.1.2 has seen many problems. The iphone entering into recovery mode is the most common. Not sure whether this is sensible but lot's of people on the internet claim that the update-over-the-air is causing the iphone to enter in recovery mode in first place i.e.: Problems updating iPhone to iOS 7.1.2: what to do?

I usually update my iphone with itunes which should technically prevent the update to fail and the phone to enter recovery mode. I've stuck to iTunes updates ever since the release of iOS 7 which if you remember also caused major issues during the update process and led to countless wiped devices.

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Answer 9

Jul 11, 2014 1:06 PM in response to celladoor

Well, in this case it's definitely not caused by an over-the-air update, because I did it through iTunes. I always update everything on my iPhone through iTunes, unless I have to go for an extended period without access to my main system, and then only particular apps whose updates I consider important.

Also, my phone didn't enter recovery mode because the update failed—I intentionally put it into recovery mode to reset its contents. I just didn't expect that doing so would force an OS update. The update was fine. It was restoring from backup that failed.

That said, this is good advice in general. I know that Apple has been adding more and more features that enable one to fully use an iDevice without needing a computer, but I still think that tying it to an iTunes installation provides protections and benefits that just can't be achieved without it.

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Answer 10

Aug 4, 2014 11:24 AM in response to Ocean20

That is rude. No one requires that you read it. If you're not willing to read someone's problem, then just move along. Snotty comments are not appreciated by anyone in this forum.

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Answer 11

Aug 4, 2014 11:28 AM in response to MarquelleDavianMcKean

Did you ever find a solution? I came here because I've been putting off updating my iPhone for just this reason. Apple's 'updates' are notoriously buggy and dangerous to one's data. And a backup doesn't really restore everything. It can wreck many files, duplicate and generally, wreak havoc.

I'll keep checking to see if you have anything to report. If not, I'll just for go some of the 'bells and whistles' that go with the update, and keep going with what I have.

Apple's refusal to tell you what the 'other' is is particularly disturbing. I found some years ago, after a computer crash, that the Apple tech I talked to on the phone told me that I really don't need to know where the data files are...that they don't expect anyone to understand. Obviously HE didn't even understand.

Apple has had some nice products, but this proprietary attitude of theirs is condescending. They want everyone to just do as they're told. Apple isn't for someone who is capable of free thinking, I guess.

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