my mini ipad is saying connect to itunes

That implies that it's gone into recovery mode - connect the iPad to your computer by its cable, and you open iTunes on the computer it should recognise the iPad and you should let you reset the iPad back to factory defaults, after which you can restore to your last backup (if you've only been backing up to the cloud then after resetting the iPad you may need to do Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content & Settings on it so that you can get to the iOS Setup Assistant screens on it and be able to restore to the icloud backup) or just resync your content to it.