Poof! iPad partly erased all by itself??

[john-o]

Anyone here ever experienced this?

I opened my 3rd gen iPad tonight, did a little look around, might've updated a couple of apps, and then it went back to sleep while I was doing something else. Within a minute or two, I swiped it back awake, and POOF! about half (or more) of my apps are gone... I had a full main screen and the second 'page' was almost full of app folders (which were mostly full in turn). Now there's just two rows of apps on the main screen and just a sprinkling of apps in the folders on the second screen. Wallpapers are fine, as is all my music and photos...

WTF???

I have a backup I can restore from that's only about 5 days old, and I don't do much other than surf and email on it, but this is really disconcerting. Could iCloud cause such a thing? Could the solid state storage be going bad?

Any thoughts??

[onthedownlow]

Possible WiFi-syncing issue? (if used)

[rgG]

Have you tried a restart?
My iPad lost all of my bookmarks the other day.
I closed and restarted Safari, and they luckily came back.

[modelamac]

john-o wrote:
Anyone here ever experienced this?

I opened my 3rd gen iPad tonight, did a little look around, might've updated a couple of apps, and then it went back to sleep while I was doing something else. Within a minute or two, I swiped it back awake, and POOF! about half (or more) of my apps are gone... I had a full main screen and the second 'page' was almost full of app folders (which were mostly full in turn). Now there's just two rows of apps on the main screen and just a sprinkling of apps in the folders on the second screen. Wallpapers are fine, as is all my music and photos...

WTF???

I have a backup I can restore from that's only about 5 days old, and I don't do much other than surf and email on it, but this is really disconcerting. Could iCloud cause such a thing? Could the solid state storage be going bad?

Any thoughts??

My first thought is recovery, and then to wonder what happened.

I'd connect directly to iTunes to see if the missing apps are still there. You can't lose apps purchased from the Apps store, and it's unlikely lose anything that was on your Mac. It's what doesn't fit those two categories that depends on your syncing habits.

Whether you need to Restore from a backup or not depends on what disappeared. The backups contain the system and only really a picture of the rest. They are not clones. Restoring fixes any system problems, restores your settings, and that's it. Syncing is what will bring back pictures, apps, music and data. You've lost whatever wasn't syncing and is no missing.

I have no idea why this happened. Not heard of it before.

[john-o]

Update:

Syncing returned everything to normal, though something's still weird, because the total space used has reduced by about 6 or 7 gigs. The "Other" category is over 7 gigs too...

Who knows, but it seems to be working fine. I'll have to look into where the data discrepancy is.

Talked to Apple, and they had no clue. Had me do a data dump from my desktop after syncing the iPad, and I sent that along in case there's some hint in a log file somewhere. Doubt I'll ever hear back from them though...

[guitarist]

john-o, sorry about that. I was in a van, parked in your neighborhood that night, testing some black-market wireless surveillance equipment.. and, well. It was an error. Hope I didn't interrupt anything important.