“iCloud Backup” • Hacker News Board

Re: “iCloud Backup”

#81

Post by jmreid » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 4:28 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #73

jesseendahl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that the iPhone asks you if you want to keep a local copy of your contacts & calendars when you remove an Exchange account, so you may have hit "No" on accident.

It didnt on my old iPhone 3G. Gone were all my contacts and calendering data, including birthdays. I had to export my stuff to CSV and massage it in local Outlook and do some reverse-and-double-wipe sync stuff through iTunes. It was horrible and I refuse to buy another iDevice ever again.

Sounds like you were using an exchange server for your work, and you were storing all your information on that server. Could have been avoided by not storing personal data on your work servers and making sure you have the settings set to store them on the device itself or MobileMe/iCloud.

This kind of behaviour is probably something businesses like. Info on company servers stays on the servers.

This isn't an "iDevice" issue, it's a data ownership issue.

Re: “iCloud Backup”

#82

Post by jmreid » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

kylec wrote: post #20

Last friday a co-worker managed to snag one of the new iPhone 5s from an AT&T store and wanted to transfer everything from his old iPhone 3GS to it. He had not been syncing his 3GS to any computer, so I thought it would be a simple matter to set it up to sync with iTunes on his work computer, have it make a backup, then restore that backup onto the iPhone 5. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it should be. The syn…

I was bitten by that with my new iPad. It is not at all obvious that 'backed up' isn't actually all backed up.

Best thing to do is never sync with iTunes. Just detach completely.

I set my iPad up (and my new iPhone) without iTunes at all. iCloud backup let me move from an iPhone 4 to 5 without a USB cable at all and all my data moved over perfectly.

I plug in to my computer to transfer videos that don't transfer using Photostream. I also occasionally will do a sync of movies for a trip.

Music is iTunes Match. Photos are Photostream. Email is IMAP. Contacts/Calendars/etc is iCloud.

It actually works very well and I'm able to move to new devices or restore from a backup without issues.

No iTunes is the answer!

Re: “iCloud Backup”

#83

Post by swang » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

jmreid wrote: post #81

josteink wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didnt on my old iPhone 3G. Gone were all my contacts and calendering data, including birthdays. I had to export my stuff to CSV and massage it in local Outlook and do some reverse-and-double-wipe sync stuff through iTunes. It was horrible and I refuse to buy another iDevice ever again.

Sounds like you were using an exchange server for your work, and you were storing all your information on that server. Could have been avoided by not storing personal data on your work servers and making sure you have the settings set to store them on the device itself or MobileMe/iCloud. This kind of behaviour is probably something businesses like. Info on company servers stays on the servers. This isn't an "iDevice…

Yeah I too was on an Exchange server. I had no idea it was storing on only Exchange/that one account. Really hard to discern where it was saving contacts to, hence why I had about 8 or so contacts left over when I deleted the account.

Re: “iCloud Backup”

#84

Post by 89a » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 6:36 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #79

Ntrails wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why can't Apple be smarter and have iTunes download all information from the iPhone upon connection?" I would imagine this is because the iPhone/Pod/Pad is expected to be a slave not a master. When I hook my iPhone up to someone else's computer, it asks me if I want to overwrite everything on the phone with that data, not upload my data over theirs. Indeed, with purchased data going up from a phone the computer shou…

I would imagine this is because the iPhone/Pod/Pad is expected to be a slave not a master. Why would this always be the case? I'd expect the mobile device to have more accurate/newer information than the stationary device, most of the time. If you're networking at lunch or a conference, and you put all that info into your phone, why wouldn't that be synced with the PC instead of the other way around?

Because that's how it was with iPods.

iOS5 changes it more over to the iOS device though

Re: “iCloud Backup”

#85

Post by karpathy » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 9:00 PM UTC

Adirael wrote: post #68

karpathy wrote: post #61

I have a flipped perspective of this. In my experience, Apple tries to be too clever and does many unintuitive things behind the scenes so that "it just works". I went through a horror scenario that scared me when I bought a new iPhone and my old pictures and videos for some reason did not sync over to the new device. I thought for a few brief moments that I lost 2 years worth of pictures and videos and that was enou…

You can use the Dropbox App to do that for you, it will sync your media with your Dropbox automatically. I think in this sync issue DRM is at fault. Sync between old iPods and iTunes worked that way because music was DRM'ed and they didn't want you to give your friend your 40GB iPod and let him copy all your music. It has been carried away too long, there should be two way sync. This is a special pain in the ass when…

Ah! Definitely not using Dropbox app to do the syncing for me automatically. Again, too much magic for something too important. I can't be guaranteed that the Dropbox app maybe somehow loses authentication and silently stops syncing, or maybe I edit a photo on iPhone and its filename is unchanged in the filysystem and it doesn't get synced over, or anything similarly weird and technical goes wrong.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but all I want is a perfect and completely transparent guarantee that I have a complete snapshot of my most important files. I'm willing to do the little manual work for it.