It just (doesn't) work
Feb. 7th, 2013 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungWhen you make a backup of your Idevice, Apple, in its wisdom, does not consider your POP email account to be worth backing up (because what are you doing still having a POP account, you retro loser? that is SO last century! Just give all your private information to Google the way God intended!). If you are ever in a situation of doing a restore from backup, you will find that poof, all email stored on your device is gone forever. Lovely.
Another thing that's not included when you tell Itunes to make a backup of your Ithing -- your apps. One would think that a "backup" would be, you know, a full backup, but no. To back up your apps, you counter-intuitively have to tell it to "transfer purchases" (said option being hidden behind a right-click on the name of the Igadget). And then, after restoring from backup, in order to actually have your apps on there with the data that you restored from backup, you must go to the "apps" pane of Itunes' list of things you can do with the plugged in Iwidget, and individually tell it to "install" each app that you wish to have on the device. What fun!
(eta, forgot to mention that) What this bifurcated and broken backup system means, of course, is that if your app does not store its data in exactly the apple-blessed manner, then there is no way to do a backup of that apps data. Stanza appears to store its books in the blessed manner (but the app is abandoned and only half-functional under IOS 6); Shubook does not(1). Poof, all those books you uploaded? gone. After all, like your emails, they must not have been very important, right? Fortunately we store our ebooks on Dropbox, so no great harm done. Still, backup is supposed to save all your data, or so I was told.
(1) We shall not speak of Ibooks and the myriad other ebook (cr)apps that were obviously never designed to be used with a library of more than a hundred or so books.
Another thing that's not included when you tell Itunes to make a backup of your Ithing -- your apps. One would think that a "backup" would be, you know, a full backup, but no. To back up your apps, you counter-intuitively have to tell it to "transfer purchases" (said option being hidden behind a right-click on the name of the Igadget). And then, after restoring from backup, in order to actually have your apps on there with the data that you restored from backup, you must go to the "apps" pane of Itunes' list of things you can do with the plugged in Iwidget, and individually tell it to "install" each app that you wish to have on the device. What fun!
(eta, forgot to mention that) What this bifurcated and broken backup system means, of course, is that if your app does not store its data in exactly the apple-blessed manner, then there is no way to do a backup of that apps data. Stanza appears to store its books in the blessed manner (but the app is abandoned and only half-functional under IOS 6); Shubook does not(1). Poof, all those books you uploaded? gone. After all, like your emails, they must not have been very important, right? Fortunately we store our ebooks on Dropbox, so no great harm done. Still, backup is supposed to save all your data, or so I was told.
(1) We shall not speak of Ibooks and the myriad other ebook (cr)apps that were obviously never designed to be used with a library of more than a hundred or so books.