Help-- Recover App data without restoring from Backup?
In the last couple of months my wife's iPhone has acted strange from time to time, sometimes requiring a forced restart, but I never got around to a restore, because it would start behaving again. This past weekend, her email on the phone went crazy. First is started reporting that she had literally more than 4 trillion emails unread, but the mail icon on home screen had no unread messages badge, and there were no unread emails showing in the actual inbox. Then it escalated to somehow spawn a duplicate email account on the phone, with a slightly different identifier name (The original account was called RoadRunner, and the new one was listed as her email address). The new spawned account did not have the trillion unread messages. After finding nothing online about this, I forced restart with no change. I re-synced with iTunes, no change. Updated her to iOS 4.0.1, no change. So I finally called AppleCare. They suggested restoring to factory, and then setting phone up as a new phone (not restoring from backup), otherwise it would bring the issues back.
So I made sure to backup her photos and videos on the phone, and did a restore. From there I setup as new phone, and synced to put her media back on the phone. The email issues was resolved, however all her apps are now missing data, which really sucks. For her apps that keep the data on the server like Facebook and Words with Friends, it doesn't matter. But for all the rest, she lost game progress, and un-synced iCal events (unfortunately her iTunes prefs had sync iCal as unchecked). I wish I had noticed this as she had alot of work related events programmed in.
My questions:
Do you agree that if I were to now restore her phone to a previous backup that it would in fact bring back the weird email issues? Is this a bad idea?
If restoring from back up is bad, is there a way to recover any data for her apps from the backup file?
So I made sure to backup her photos and videos on the phone, and did a restore. From there I setup as new phone, and synced to put her media back on the phone. The email issues was resolved, however all her apps are now missing data, which really sucks. For her apps that keep the data on the server like Facebook and Words with Friends, it doesn't matter. But for all the rest, she lost game progress, and un-synced iCal events (unfortunately her iTunes prefs had sync iCal as unchecked). I wish I had noticed this as she had alot of work related events programmed in.
My questions:
Do you agree that if I were to now restore her phone to a previous backup that it would in fact bring back the weird email issues? Is this a bad idea?
If restoring from back up is bad, is there a way to recover any data for her apps from the backup file?
Comments
Have you thought about restoring from an older backup, going in and checking iCal sync so the Calendar syncs, and then reinstalling as a new phone and syncing again?
That is a very interesting idea. Obviously that doesn't bring back her game save data or other App data, but that is not nearly as important as getting the iCal data back. On a side-note I sure wish Apple would improve and simplify the iPhone Backup/Sync/Restore process. Mainly I just want to be able to understand the process better. But it seems like there should be a way to save all App data and put this back on the phone, even if you need a fresh copy of iOS to run from.
So, assuming that iTunes created a back-up file each time I synced her phone in the past, then I should be able to restore from an earlier backup when she presumably had her iCal info on the phone. Then sync the phone's iCal data only to make sure it is on her iMac. From there I have a question...
Would I then restore the phone as new again and sync? Or could I restore from the backup file that is current as of right now? Restoring to the most recent backup where she has no email problems should be just fine right? Then I could just re-sync and have iCal replace data on the phone.
Likewise, I have had a few calendar events that were on my phone just randomly disappear in the last week or so. I'm not sure why this would happen. Obviously if I had synced my iPhone sooner, then at least I would still have this data on my MacBook, but it is still a problem that they disappeared from the phone in the first place. I don't use mobileme, so it isn't related to any online server glitch. I can't feel confident with using it as my primary calendar if items can just disappear without warning. Based on my issues, I think my wife is just going to start using her Blackberry for her primary mobile calendar so she doesn't risk losing any data.