Terrible update issues, erased my iPad to factory restore
I decided to update the software on my iPad 2 this evening. I have updated software on this iPad previously without any problem. It's not jailbroken or anything. When I hit 'update' it said "verifying update" for a few seconds, then the screen went black and showed a picture of the usb cable and the iTunes logo. I had never seen this screen before. When I plugged it into iTunes, it told me something like "this iPad must be restored to factory settings before updating." WTH??!? There was no option to back-up, restore from back-up, nothing. I tried to shut down my iPad and plug it back in again, but still it gave me no options to back up. So it left me no other option except to hit restore and update, which then took over an hour. I left it plugged in, and nothing happened after the update. It just had an apple logo on my iPad screen. So I unplugged it, plugged it back in, and it said, "Welcome to your new iPad! Do you want to set up as new, or restore from back-up?" Are they KIDDING me??? The last back-up I created was more than a year ago. So ALL of my apps/photos/data/contacts/date planner/finances/school notes are gone now because of an UPDATE??? I loveD Apple but I think from now on I refer to them as A$$PPLE.
Thanks for the "update." Now I have more than a year's worth of apps and information to restore/repurchase/reload, not to mention all photos of my grandchildren gone, just like that. I will NEVER purchase another Apple product again. In fact, at this point it's more trouble than it's worth and I will probably just sell the empty POS. But hey, it's UPDATED.
Comments
If you right-click on the device in iTunes, there should be an option to backup. It should have done this automatically before the update though. I really do wish Apple would address this. Erasing a device should almost never be the course of action - imagine if they did that on the Mac side where they erase the entire drive by connecting to a different computer that doesn't belong to you or installing a software update. The iOS devices need to be treated like master devices i.e don't get completely erased on a whim. A few people have lost data during updates:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3374995?start=0&tstart=0
The alternatives aren't much better unfortunately. You kind of have to manually backup all mobile devices to be sure you won't lose data during updates. None of them are supposed to erase data during updates but it does happen. Cloud backups are one way they try to get round it e.g iCloud and Google services but they aren't ideal, especially if you don't like the idea of sending your personal data to a remote server.
They have a feedback page that you might want to use to let them know what happened:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html