I decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G to iOS 4 today, despite worries that ultimately, it would just slow my phone down more. We’ll see. After an hour of waiting just for the phone to backup, I got a tip off Twitter that let me get through the upgrade process painlessly in 45 minutes flat. Here’s what I did.
Big hat tip to Jake Feuerbacher, who told me to do a restore rather than an upgrade. It’s something he picked up off this Apple support forum thread, and it did the trick.
Backing Up … Forever!
Initially, I had loaded iTunes, plugged in my iPhone and got a message that there was an update available — the iOS4 software. I had selected Update, which caused iTunes to start backing up my iPhone before it would even apply the update.
Now, backing up is a really good thing to do. I like the concept of backing up. But after about an hour, I was wondering how long this would take. When I tweeted the seemingly endless process, I got a number of responses from other people in the same situation. At that aforementioned Apple thread, you can see similar complaints.
Restore, Rather Than Update
The quick and dirty method skips doing an update. Instead, you use the “Restore” option. Do this only after you’ve downloaded iOS 4. When you choose Restore, the iPhone will look for the latest version of the iPhone software on your computer (which will be iOS 4). Then it will “restore” this version of the software, effectively upgrading your phone.
The downside? Well, the restore means you’ll end up with a “clean” phone that knows nothing about your previous settings, the apps you had installed and so on. However, that’s where Sync comes in.
Syncing Back To Normal
Be sure that you’ve fully synced your phone. Make sure that iTunes has a record of all your apps, your playlists, your purchases and so on. If you’ve done this, after doing a restore, you’ll be able to resync your phone and bring back all your apps.
This worked fine for me. There is a risk, however, that something might go wrong. If you haven’t backed up your phone, and iTunes goes haywire, maybe you’ll have to start over.
I decided it was a risk worth taking, since the backup was taking ages. Plus, on my Windows machine, I kept getting “Mobile Backup” errors anyway. I threw the dice, and they came up good for me.
Sidenotes
A few further comments on the process.While my apps came back, none of my settings within them did. So expect to spend some time setting your email back up, Twitter and so on. That was a fair trade-off, for me.
I don’t sync my photos. That’s probably the most important data that I can’t replace on my iPhone. Instead, on my Windows machine, I simply copy the photos over manually from my iPhone to my Windows machine. Not syncing may have helped speed up the process.
Also, iTunes kept screaming that I hadn’t copied some purchased items from my iPhone to iTunes, warning me not to restore before doing this. Despite syncing all my apps, I kept getting this warning. Maybe there’s some music that didn’t make it. Or maybe one of my two digital movies that came with DVDs were causing the warning. Don’t know, don’t care. But sure would have been nice if iTunes had given me some better and more specific guidance.
In the end, I did see both movies I had purchased in iTunes, so I guess they didn’t die.
I also had one horrifying moment. In the initial sync, synchronizing my music wasn’t turned on. I toggled to do this, to the playlist that I keep synced with my phone. No luck. I kept getting little Windows errors that a some required file was missing.
I exited iTunes and restarted. It then saw my phone and asked if I wanted to start a fresh phone installation or restore. Gulp. Restore? But I’d just restored! And synced! And I didn’t have 45 minutes more to spend on it now.
Despite my better judgment, I chose to restore. In about 2 minutes, that was over, then the phone started syncing all my contacts again, my calendar and my email. Then I went back to my music area, tried to sync that again and success! I was even able to sync those purchased movies.
