Restore issues - Anyone else?
My husband and I finally arrived at the time when an upgrade was due. Before picking up our new phones, I backed up my 5s using iTunes with no errors and my husband backed up his using the LG software he had.
Once we arrived home, my husband used the LG software to restore his apps, etc... it was flawless and he was up and running within 30 minutes. That's the end of his story.It just worked. My story, on the other hand, not so much...
When I attempted to restore my settings with iTunes, I was presented with a about half a dozen drop-down list of identically-named choices. There was no way to differentiate between them. We'll call this "Apple user experience fail #1". Frustrated, I started working down the list of names only to encounter failures at every turn. I was able to locate the backup folder on my hard drive from the backup I made before picking up my new phone, but there was no way to instruct iTunes to use that folder (Apple user experience fail #2). I finally arrived at what I believe to be the entry correlated to the root of the correct backup folder and attempted to restore from there. After working for a while, iTunes failed the process with "an error occured." Which error? Who knows. It didn't say. Error number? Nope. Any more info in the windows event log? None (Apple user experience fail #3). We can also call this last part "sophomoric software imlementation" because if you cannot bother to even assist the user in resolving their issue during such a critical operation, you really have no business writing or distributing software.
Ok. It was now appearing likely that my data was gone and I would have to rebuild all my apps, settings, etc... from scratch... by hand, and it was entirely Apple's fault. It was at this point that I reached the "25% sure that I will be switching to android next time" threshold. Next, noticing that there was a "restore from cloud" option and in a last ditch effort to not have to rebuild all of my content, I selected it. It seemed to start well and didn't give me any errors, so I went about my business while it worked. Enough of my apps were restored relatively quickly that I thought the ordeal was over and that this last line of defense had saved me, so I calmed down and left the process lamenting how bad the iPhone and iTunes experience had become over the last few years.
I live in the country and we have WiMax internet that isn't so fast, is pretty expensive, and has a 150GB monthly data cap before the per-GB charges start. Since I was moving from a not-entirely-full 32GB 5s, I figured I'd be fine while the iCloud restore continued. Again... not so much. Over the course of the next week my family noticed that the internet was slower than normal but didn't think to correlate it to my phone. It wasn't until we got the notice from our ISP that we'd managed to hit our ENTIRE monthly data cap in a single week that my husband started scouring the network for the offending device. The ISP provided a dated graph of usage and - surprise - the floodgates opened when the iPhone came home and was essentially at full throttle the whole time.
Somehow, the iPhone - in its attempt to restore far less than 32GB of data had managed to consume 150GB of traffic. This passes straight beyond the "Apple user experience fail #4" only to arrive at "Apple apparently doesn't care any more." Thanks to this complete failure on the part of Apple - and Apple alone - my internet bill was $45 higher than it should have been.
But, that's ok. Live and learn. Has anyone else experienced this kind of multi-tiered failure?
