IPhone backup / restore


  • BINNED

    So today I tried to restore my iPhone, giving the following pleasant experience.

    First, obviously, I did a backup. Backup asked me (translated and from memory):
    "There is purchased media on your phone not in your media library. Do you want to sync it to your library?"
    I click the "Yes (of course, dumbass)" button and vaguely remember what'll be next. iTunes complains that this computer isn't "activated"/"authorized" for this. Instead of letting me do that right there, it tells me where to find that option in the menu. By now I'm well aware that I've done this before and this computer already is activated! Anyways, go to the menu, activate, try again. Same error message. Do the usual trick of first deactivating, then activating again. Next try. Still no luck.
    Fuck it, who cares. On we go.

    Make sure that the backup files on the harddrive are readable (don't want a bad backup) and proceed with "restore from backup".
    "Calculating remaining time" on iTunes, "restoring" on the phone. Looks good so far.
    Phone restarts, iTunes gives me the message:
    "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because not enough free space is available on the iPhone"

    What?? Why? How is that even possible?
    It is a backup of the phone, it cannot be larger than the phone's storage.



  • Assuming it stores the backup on the device temporarily (or permanently), that message seems to indicate that there is not enough room to do so. I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion.



  • @aapis said:

    Assuming it stores the backup on the device temporarily (or permanently), that message seems to indicate that there is not enough room to do so. I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion.

    What an interesting design.

    It would first make it extremely annoying to restore from backup, once the free space on the phone was less than the size of the backup

    And then, once the users had been trained- "To restore, first you delete all your user data files- No worries, the backup will have them", you get to the point where the phone storage is almost full, you take a backup, try to restore it- Not enough space, delete all user files... and still not enough space. You end up with a backup it's impossible to restore, and a loss of data on the phone

    (Yes, to be fair, you probably need some files that don't compress well for the size of backup plus size of bare bones OS to be greater than that of local storage... but still, why would you do such a thing in the first place?)



  • @cdosrun said:

    why would you do such a thing in the first place?
    Because you work for Apple and you're arrogant as fuck, so you're quite sure that backing up your shit is something only a very small minority of your assumed-utterly-clueless user base will ever work out that it either should or could do, so it doesn't matter if it only kinda-sorta works.



  • Some time ago a client had to have his Lumia 900 replaced. That's when we found out that despite the Zune software offering a backup option, you can't restore that backup anywhere but on the original phone - and that only if the phone hasn't been factory reset. How's that for a WTF? (not to mention that upgrading the phone to the latest firmware took about 2 hours, since instead of simply installing the latest firmware, it first had to install every intermediate release)


  • BINNED

    @aapis said:

    Assuming it stores the backup on the device temporarily (or permanently), that message seems to indicate that there is not enough room to do so. I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion.
     

    Because it should overwrite the existing data on the phone?!? What use is a backup function that only works if you've used less than 50% of the device's storage.
    If I'm running full on the 32GB storage, I still want a working backup. Like this, I can happily create a backup that is 25 GB in size on my HDD, assuming my data is safe, only to be later told it can't be restored.

    I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion that this isn't idiotic.


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