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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > My Stupid Fault: iCloud vs local iPhone backups

My Stupid Fault: iCloud vs local iPhone backups
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NewsPoster
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Jul 22, 2015, 06:01 PM
 
Yeah, right. "We should do an occasional column where we each admit to huge technology problems that were entirely our own doing," MacNN management said. "Maybe readers could learn from our mistakes, perhaps they can avoid doing similar things, and certainly we'll all have a good laugh," they said. "You go first."

When my iPhone 5 died and I bought an iPhone 6, I was running in to the Apple Store from one meeting and running out to another, fully expecting this to be only a brief hiatus in my work. Years ago, I took my iPhone 3GS, or maybe 4, to an Apple Store hoping for some help with a problem, and they replaced it. Gave me a new one for free, which is extraordinary, and by the time I'd got back to my car, that iPhone had all my emails, contacts and settings -- which is miraculous. I want to say it also had all my apps, but I'm not sure: I seem to remember downloading some key ones right away, but that might have been impatience.



This time I left that Apple Store with my old phone number, but nothing else. No contacts, no emails. That would be my fault: I'd entered the wrong Apple ID (I have three of them). One is for my Mac at home, which I now realize is the center of my iCloudness, and two are for my iPhone and iPad: I have a US and a UK iTunes Store account for my review work. As I was holding an iPhone, I kept trying to enter my iPhone Apple ID, and it was failing.

I had to go back to my own office and try again when I'd realized what I'd done. Hats off to Apple: they knew what I'd done, and were doing their best to nudge me in the right direction, I was just refusing to budge from the certainty that I had the right ID.

In a word, backup

I don't mind being wrong, I don't mind being corrected. What I mind is that it's now nearly three weeks since I got the iPhone 6, and I am still having to change settings. Opening a new app or going to do something new in one I use every day, I feel I am constantly re-linking it to Dropbox and Evernote. I am continually changing some setting or other that I didn't know was there, because it's so long since I'd touched it before.

I also mind a little bit that the problem is how I hadn't backed up my iPhone properly. I mind this chiefly because I had just written an article about losing my iMac for a week, and how often Apple had kept asking me if I had a backup. I did then, for that. I don't now, not for this.

The reason is that I switched on iCloud backup rather than local backup for the old iPhone, plus most apps I rely on to create information have their own iCloud, Dropbox or other backup service, like OmniPresence. I was not going to lose any data, I knew it. I just didn't appreciate how much else gets backed up when you backup your phone directly to your Mac or Windows PC through iTunes.



If I'd done that recently, then just by connecting the new phone to my iMac I would've got all my apps back, plus all their settings. In an effort to save space (because iCloud is limited in its free incarnation to 5GB), the iCloud-only backup of an iPhone doesn't remember all that minutia, it just puts your purchased apps back on in the order they are restored. I might well still have had to re-up with Dropbox and Evernote, but I wouldn't have spent an evening trying to remember what apps I had on the front screen of my iPhone 5.

These are apps I used every day, and I failed to remember three of them. Three crucial ones. Fortunately, I do take screengrabs of the front screen every time I change something, just so I can put back the one app I've temporarily removed. This time, I had to put them all back.

Casualities of war

I did lose data. I'm still holding out hope that when I get some time to look into it I will find XpenseTracker's cache of expenses somewhere on Dropbox, but for now that app is empty.

I used to use a counting app called Kount.ly, and while it's not its fault that I've lost all my counts, the app's latest redesign limits you to one count unless you register. I didn't know that, as it let me keep the six or seven that I had from the previous version, but I was aware I couldn't create any more without upgrading.

That just involves signing up for a Kount.ly account -- it isn't an in-app purchase that costs anything. I was just put off by how rigorously the app kept asking me to sign in, for no particular benefit to me. Then when I caved and pressed the button to upgrade, I got an error message beginning with "Ooops" and I just started looking around for something else.

That was one good thing: I found an alternative. I've swapped from Kount.ly to Tally 2, and much prefer it. Kount.ly has a great feature in that it logs the date and time you counted something, so you can see charts of how often you did a thing over time. Tally 2 doesn't have that, but since I've lost all my Kount.ly data, right now that isn't a visible difference.

TextExpander was a surprising problem. I have and very much use TextExpander 5 for OS X and the latest iOS version, TextExpander Touch 3. This must be one of the very first apps I re-downloaded for my new iPhone, yet I couldn't get TextExpander Touch 3 to remember that I had hundreds of what it calls snippets and triggers. Except, I used to have TextExpander 4 for OS X, and if I tell the iOS app that's still what I've got, I can use an older sync service which works.



Again, it was all working before my iPhone 5 became no more than a tooth-breaking chocolate bar, so it should have worked immediately on my iPhone 6. It would have, too -- if I had done a complete backup, the non-iCloud option, to my Mac.

That's the bottom line here: back up your iPhone and iPad to your Mac through iTunes, rather than an iCloud backup, and do it regularly -- if you want to be able to restore the your iOS device exactly as it was when you replace it. The iCloud backup is good in its way, particularly for people who don't tie their device to a Mac or Windows PC, but it is not as complete. High scores in games not using Game Center, for example, aren't saved -- you can pretend it won't bother you, but you know it will.

As for my other issues with my new iPhone: Apple is quite brilliant at making this transition seamless, but there's a reason IT professionals class some problems as being "finger trouble." I've had problems with my iPhone 6, and every one is down to me having not pressed the right button back on my 5.

I can tell you that it feels good opening up to you about this. Mind you, you're a lot nicer and kinder than the evil MacNN team. Let's see them confess what problems they've created for themselves, while I continue to re-install apps onto my Apple Watch.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Jul 23, 2015 at 10:19 AM. )
     
fds
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Jul 22, 2015, 07:07 PM
 
You should have asked for help earlier, as your assumptions are not quite correct. The automatic iCloud backups on iOS are by no means that useless or limited as you think they are. By default, they absolutely do contain everything a local iTunes backup would have, including all third-party app data. Developers do have a way of marking specific files to be excluded from the backups, meant to be used in case those files could be regenerated or redownloaded on the fly when missing. But no developer would exclude important user files or settings from your iCloud backup!

All you should have done once you figured out you logged in with the wrong iCloud account is to go to settings and Reset iPhone. Then it goes back to the setup loop and you could log in with the proper Apple ID and access your backups. You might actually still be able to access a backup of suitable vintage right now! Except now that you spent all that time redoing your settings you might not want to go back to a weeks old backup...

In short iCloud backups coupled with an enabled iCloud keychain are about as complete as you can get for iOS devices.
It's good practice to also update a local iTunes backup (with the encryption checkbox enabled) every week or so, but it's strictly for peace of mind, or as an alternative for a quicker restore than redownloading everything.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Jul 22, 2015, 07:20 PM
 
Thus, "My Stupid Fault." We're not super-studs, everybody breaks some stuff along the way, and doesn't quite noodle their way through. This is a chronicle of same, and the process through.

It's not a how-to. Just a chronicle, and if we can help one person not screw up stuff like we have in the past as a cautionary tale, then the series is a success.
     
slapppy
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Jul 22, 2015, 08:42 PM
 
Yeah but if you have a family of iOS users and one Mac. You should explain how to keep backups and content separated when using only one Mac with iTunes.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Jul 22, 2015, 09:01 PM
 
That is literally not the point of this series.

That kind of thing, the "how to keep backups and content separated when using only one Mac," a clean step-by-step, we do in our Pointers. Again, this is a chronicle of tech problems we've given ourselves along the way, and our sometimes ugly way out -- and how it could have been avoided in the first place. It's not so much of a how-to, more of a way to get to know us, the things we do, and our thought process getting through problems.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Jul 22, 2015, 09:33 PM
 
Yeah, but the article's wrong when it says that iCloud backups aren't as good as local backups, and actuall...

...kidding. The point of the article is quite obvious, and despite others' attempts at completely ignoring the first paragraph, was entertaining to read from a technological curiosity standpoint as well as the train wreck factor.

It's a nice insight into the workings of someone else's mind when faced with a technological hurdle, even if, and especially if, those workings aren't what the reader would've done personally.
     
Charles Martin
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Jul 22, 2015, 10:59 PM
 
slapppy: There's really nothing to explain. Each device has its own backup.

fds: you appear to have badly misread the article. At no point are the iCloud backups mischaracterized, and they are not referred to as "useless." Apple itself explains, very clearly, the difference between iCloud and local backups here: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204136

This PC world article also does a good job of summarizing the differences: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2154792/backups-via-icloud-or-itunes-the-crucial-differences-that-affect-your-data.html

So as you can see, there are significant differences as the article referred to. In addition, some settings for some apps are simply not retained with iCloud backups -- numerous staffers can attest to this fact -- indeed, I saw some programs lose their settings just because of installing the iOS 9 beta on an iPad!
Charles Martin
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Steve Wilkinson
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Jul 23, 2015, 12:13 AM
 
Heh, fds has apparently been nipping the kool-aid. Basic piece of advice... don't trust Apple cloud stuff, period. I use it, but I don't trust it. (ex: I make local archives of stuff like my Calendar and Contacts too... separate from any backups).

The other problem, iCloud is way too all-or-nothing with little control over it. It's nice to know there is some other store of data, out there, somewhere, that you might be able to access across devices. But, depending on it is a disaster waiting to happen.
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cgWerks | TilledSoil.org
     
aroxnicadi
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Jul 23, 2015, 07:26 AM
 
I do both
     
aroxnicadi
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Jul 23, 2015, 07:38 AM
 
I do both, but I see so many not backing up either there iPhone or Samsung. I get calls from employees that run their own phones at work that have all their contacts etc on it that they use on a daily basis and when the phone gets lost or damaged by them or someone else they call me asking for everything that I might have sent them in the past year. Sorry, but if you dumb enough to have someone that that says they are a expert at jail breaking your phone and then the proceed to totally erase everything on the phone and you don't have a back up and the expert didn't back it up then how much of an expert were they. The old adage in the banking world is location, location. In the computer world and with cellphones it is backup, backup.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Jul 23, 2015, 07:57 AM
 
In general, in the computing world mobile or not, "backup, backup" is a pretty good adage.

There's at lease one more tale of woe about this on OS X.
     
Steve Wilkinson
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Jul 23, 2015, 12:24 PM
 
Heh, I've worked in IT consulting or IT operations for many years and my adage... never trust technology. Yep, that's the key to my success in the field. It's kind of like Murphy's Law. Just try to assume that everything that can go wrong probably will and try to prepare for it. Backup, backup, or maybe better, Backup, archive, is really high on the list.

I actually have a good (well, not so good) story about a situation I walked into during my consulting career. It was an architectural firm that nearly lost everything. They had a network of about 40 CAD stations, a nice server, a very advanced (for the time) DAT backup system, etc. Unfortunately, they got robbed, and guess what, those thieves not only took that advanced DAT system, but all the tapes as well. They had gotten lazy about keeping an off-site rotation... and even worse, had brought all the tapes back and none were off-site.

Fortunately, one of the partners, a couple months earlier, had backed up a whole section of the server of project files (probably just because it was easier than picking specific projects) to do some work at home. And, another even older tape was found in a desk drawer of one of the offices that hadn't been rummaged. They lost a lot, but were able to put like 75% of their projects back together and at least some of their other administrative documents. A huge blow, but at least it didn't put them out of business.
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DiabloConQueso
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Jul 23, 2015, 02:51 PM
 
Heh, you might have heard about how Pixar's Toy Story 2 was almost deleted in its entirety, if it weren't for a lone animator who happened to have taken a complete copy of the work up to then home:

http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/
     
   
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