Earlier today, I took my trusty iPhone 4 into an Apple Store to have an odd issue looked at. The front glass panel had started making an odd popping sound when you pressed on it, almost like it was starting to delaminate. I’ve also been having a few intermittent problems where the multi-touch sensing seemed to go haywire. It’s been going on for several weeks, but I’ve just now had a chance to take care of it. The friendly and awesome Genius helping me at the Apple Store diagnosed things and then immediately swapped out my phone with a new one. Perfect.
As an aside, I continue to be impressed with how great the service is at my local Portland Apple Store. They always sort out the skill set of the person they are talking to very quickly and respond accordingly. It’s refreshing not to have to go through the “yes, the Oh-En Oh-Eff-Eff switch is in the ON position” routine.
Back to the story, The next step after getting the replacement phone, of course, was to restore my data from a backup. The last time I did this, I had to do the restore via iTunes and a USB cable. This time, I used the new iCloud backup and restore feature. Long story short, it worked just fine. But, I did run into two bugs that kept it from being as drop dead simple as it could have been.
The first bug is in the process of swapping out the phone. When the Genius handed me the new iPhone after swapping out my AT&T SIM card, it was already in a fully usable state with Springboard running, not at the initial out-of-the-box setup screen where you can select if you want to restore from a backup or set up as a fresh device. It took me a few minutes after leaving the Genius Bar (but still in the store to use the WiFi network, mind you) to sort out that I needed to fully erase and reset the phone to get to the restore from backup options.
Not a major bump, to be sure, for someone who is handy with such things, but for a regular user, it would be much smoother if the phone were handed over by the Genius in the setup state.
The second bug is a software one. After getting to the restore options and logging in with my iCloud account, the only backups that were shown to me were ones from my iPad, not the ones from my iPhone. It was strange that the iPad backup showed up as options, and even stranger that my iPhone backup wasn’t there. I knew from checking before my appointment that my iPhone backups were safe and sound on iCloud, but they weren’t showing up in the restore list on the new device. A bit of a head scratcher.
Now, when I was poking about the new phone earlier to sort out how to get a restore, I’d noticed that the installed OS was iOS 5.0. My old phone had already been upgraded to 5.1. On a hunch that the OS version matters to the backup and that you can’t update data from a fresher install to a device with an earlier OS, I went through the upgrade process. In this case, I had set the phone up as a new device, do the system upgrade, then go through the erase and reset cycle again and… voila! My backup from my old iPhone 4 showed up. The hunch panned out.
Again, not a major bump if you’re willing to sort out the right dance, but really the restore screens should indicate when a backup from a newer version is available, but which can’t be applied until the local device is upgraded. Also, there should be a way to do an upgrade of the system software without having to setup the device.
In any case, the restore from iCloud worked quite nicely. The phone spent the next few hours—I’m not sure exactly how long, I was ignoring it—pulling down applications and generally bringing my phone back to where it was this morning before I went into the Apple Store.
Nifty.
But don’t get me started on having to enter in credentials over a dozen times after restore. iMessage. FaceTime. Find My Friends. Email accounts. Not to mention wireless networks. Whiskey tango foxtrot! You know, OS X has long had this technology called Keychain…
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.