Confusion about iPhone Backup/Restore

[wurm]

A little setup for you first.

I have been using an iPhone 3GS for about a year now. I've been syncing via iTunes fairly regularly without any problem.

I recently bought an iPhone 4s and just received the email about a half hour ago that it is cleared for unlocking. I guess I'm supposed to wait 24 hours, but I've also read that by the time you get the email, it's already been sent to Apple for the go-ahead. So I may just give it a shot tonight.

Part of the unlock process is to connect the new iPhone to iTunes and Backup and Restore the device (apparently as a new device). At that point, I'm supposed to see the "Congratulations. Your phone is unlocked" message.

Now I happen to know the new 4s already has ios7 installed on it by the previous owner. My old 3GS is running 6.1.2.

So here's my question. How to I get the new phone set up with all my APPS, music and other settings from my old 3GS? Or can that even happen, since I just told iTunes to set the phone up as a new device? It wouldn't be a major hassle to start from scratch, but if I can just import everything, it sure would be easier.

[LaserKun]

I don't know, but this is one thing I hope "just works", and easily! This kind of thing keeps me from doing a lot, dagnabit.

[wurm]

Never mind. It "just worked".

I opened iTunes (already had a T-Mobile sim card in the new phone). Connected the phone and it showed me the "Congratulations. Your phone is unlocked" message. Then I picked my old backup from the pull-down list and it did its thing. My only stumbling block now is that I was unable to activate my new sim on the T-Mobile website. I called customer service, who confirmed what the website said - that the new sim was invalid. She was very apologetic and said I could go to any T-Mobile store and they'd give me a new one and activate it immediately.

Hell, after all the hoop-jumping we've been through with AT&T, this will be a piece-of-cake.

[rgG]

My daughter just got a new 5S.
She backed up her 4, running iOS 6.
Nothing she tried would let the new phone restore from her back up of the 4. A new back up she made just before trying to set up the new phone.
She apparently even tried updating the 4 to iOS 7, but that didn't work either.
Then she tried to back it up to the cloud, so she could restore from that, but her 4 would not back up to the cloud.
She finally had to download an app to get her contacts to the new phone.
She was not happy. Took forever, and never did work.
Luckily, she has all her contacts backed up to Google, since she had an issue a while back with losing all her contacts even though she supposedly had them backed up to the cloud.

I have been having to trouble shoot weird data usage with my mother-in-law's new 5S. It has been just ridiculous and I am still not sure I have it solved.

I may just keep my 4 till it dies. Sometimes the price of upgrading is just too high.

Glad it "just worked" for you.
I think part of my daughter's problem is that there is some sort of issue with her old phone, since it lost all her contacts about a year ago. It has worked OK, but it seems to have issues with the cloud. Hopefully this new phone will be better.

[wurm]

Sorry to hear that, Rhonda. I'll be the first to admit my case may well have been just dumb luck. Best of luck to you and your daughter. Maybe a trip to the Apple Store is in the future? I have to think they could square things away.

[rgG]

wurm wrote:
Sorry to hear that, Rhonda. I'll be the first to admit my case may well have been just dumb luck. Best of luck to you and your daughter. Maybe a trip to the Apple Store is in the future? I have to think they could square things away.

It's ok. She got her contacts, which was all that mattered. She can move her music and photos over manually, if she wants to. It was just frustrating that it didn't work as it should.

[LaserKun]

rgG wrote:
My daughter just got a new 5S.
She backed up her 4, running iOS 6.
Nothing she tried would let the new phone restore from her back up of the 4. A new back up she made just before trying to set up the new phone.
She apparently even tried updating the 4 to iOS 7, but that didn't work either.
Then she tried to back it up to the cloud, so she could restore from that, but her 4 would not back up to the cloud.
She finally had to download an app to get her contacts to the new phone.
She was not happy. Took forever, and never did work.
Luckily, she has all her contacts backed up to Google, since she had an issue a while back with losing all her contacts even though she supposedly had them backed up to the cloud.

I have been having to trouble shoot weird data usage with my mother-in-law's new 5S. It has been just ridiculous and I am still not sure I have it solved.

I may just keep my 4 till it dies. Sometimes the price of upgrading is just too high.

Glad it "just worked" for you.
I think part of my daughter's problem is that there is some sort of issue with her old phone, since it lost all her contacts about a year ago. It has worked OK, but it seems to have issues with the cloud. Hopefully this new phone will be better.

That's what I meant, dagnabit.

[RAMd®d]

wurm, yes it *may have been just luck, but that's the way it's supposed to work and that's the way it worked for me going from my first 'Phone up to but not including the 5s.

Different problem I couldn't back up to my previous Mac, and I didn't have enough room at the Cloud, so the backup was fragmented and I just got a few pieces. I pretty much knew that would be the case and should have waited until I moved iTunes to a Mac that was compatible with the 5s system requirements. But I couldn't wait.


Sometimes the price of upgrading is just too high.

Agreed.

But I will say that other than the above, which could *possibly* wholly my own doing, I've only been bitten once by an iOS udpdate/upgrade, and that was with 7.0.4.

I don't know how it happened, and I'm blaming the update, regardless. But I ended up with several duplicates and triplicates in Contacts, along with email addresses misappled to other contacts. They had to be manually sorted out with the extras tossed.

Once I get 'round to moving iT to another Mac, I'll sync to it rather than the Cloud.

On my Palm V and Tungsten, I could tell the sync software to sync the palm to the Mac or the other way 'round. Maybe I'll back up but not sync to the Cloud and back up and sync to the Mac. If that's even possible.