
“iCloud Backup” - jordw
http://www.marco.org/2012/09/26/icloud-backup
======
kylec
Last friday a co-worker managed to snag one of the new iPhone 5s from an AT&T
store and wanted to transfer everything from his old iPhone 3GS to it. He had
not been syncing his 3GS to any computer, so I thought it would be a simple
matter to set it up to sync with iTunes on his work computer, have it make a
backup, then restore that backup onto the iPhone 5.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it should be. The sync appeared to go
fine, but there were no apps or anything when restored to his iPhone 5. Going
into the sync settings in iTunes offers an option to turn on app syncing,
music syncing, etc, but alarmingly doing so would have completely removed the
existing apps, music, etc on his 3GS.

Turns out that the only way to get iTunes to download the apps and other
content from the 3GS was to right-click on the device in the sidebar and click
"transfer purchases". I actually had to look up how to do this because that
function is completely non-obvious.

Why is this the case? Why can't Apple be smarter and have iTunes download all
information from the iPhone upon connection? My Palm m100 I had a decade ago
managed this just fine - I could HotSync to a computer that I had never used
before and it would dutifully sync contacts, calendar, etc, and make a full
backup of the device. Also, shame on Apple for making it so easy to wipe the
apps, music, etc off the phone during the process of trying to back them up. I
hate to think that he might have lost everything, or been completely
unsuccessful moving to his new iPhone just because of these stupid sync
restrictions.

~~~
chrisbolt
By default, iTunes pops up a message saying "you have purchased items on this
device, would you like to transfer them?"

It sounds like your co-worker said no to this in the past, and checked the box
to not pop up the message anymore.

~~~
S_A_P
I think that is kind of the point. It isn't really immediately clear what that
will do. I think the message should read something to the effect of "You have
purchased items on your device, which are not currently sync'ed to this
computer. Would you like to transfer them now?"

------
ChuckMcM
People with no technical experience using modern technology, sometimes I
explain this to folks as the "Chutes and Ladders" problem.

You set the problem up like this, person comes to you and wants to buy lunch.
You put down a "Chutes and Ladders" game (minimum age 3) and you say sure as
soon as your piece wins. Now wait and watch them. If they do anything that
isn't in the rules you play a loud buzzing sound and scold them.

The thing is that "Chutes and Ladders" is like the simplest game ever, but
when you combine "I'm trying to do X" with "Your trying to force me to learn
Y". A number of people's brain just freezes up. I don't know if that is like
some deep psychological principle but the fact that doing "Y" is totally
unrelated to trying to get "X" done its like your brain refuses to allocate
any cycles at all to learning Y. What is worse people get emotional and angry
because dammit they want X and before you blocked them they knew how to get
it.

We forget that as children when things were 'new' we expected to not know how
to do them. But when we are set in our ways that level of change is much less
tolerable. In a lot of ways all sorts of technology is like that.

One strategy I've had some success with is to take people who aren't trying to
do anything with the new technology yet and just explore it with them. That
goal of exploring allows them to ingest new concepts, and then when they try
to do something with the technology some of those 'learn the game' concepts
will already be in their brain.

~~~
baddox
I don't really get your analogy. I've never played Chutes and Ladders, so I
would probably be annoyed, but if the game is as simple as you infer, I
suspect I would be able to accomplish the goal fairly quickly.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes you would be annoyed. Chutes and Ladders consists of activating a spinner,
moving a piece along a path based on the number pointed to by the spinner,
going 'up' if you land on a ladder or 'down' if you land on a chute, and you
'win' when your piece lands exactly on the last spot. You would probably get
as few as 3 and as many as a half dozen 'buzzes' as you figured it out.

So you should try the test (or try it on an unsuspecting test candidate) my
experience has been that no matter how 'simple' the game is, the fact that it
seems completely orthogonal to the person, their ability to 'shift gears' and
learn a new thing so that they can get on with the desired thing is blocked.
It is especially true if you put a time limit on getting the desired thing
done.

The challenge is that a number of things seem to have an assumption about your
basic skills that may not be valid. An acquaintance went nuts when an app
required that he cut and paste something on his phone. He had never had a
reason to do cut and paste before so to complete the task he had to learn cut
and paste. He was making zero progress on that goal. I did it for him, then
later went back and showed him in a non time-constrained / outcome-desired
setting how to do it. That worked fine of course, and now its part of his tool
kit.

------
primigenus
This is why I'm so infatuated with the concept of the Chromebook.

A lot of the "techie" stuff like backups and restoring that Marco describes
here is solved with a Chromebook. And it uses familiar user interface
paradigms that people recognise from their experience using Windows
(especially now that they added the windows management system that looks a lot
like Windows 7), whereas the iPad has completely new paradigms that people
transitioning from a computer will find strange and foreign.

Many people I've introduced to iPads and Android devices have ended up not
really using them because they're much more familiar with the point and click
windows-based desktop system of Windows than "apps".

Not that the Chromebook fixes everything. But Google has done a great job
identifying some important problems with the way our technology works today
and is trying to get rid of those problems or make them irrelevant by
providing you with a device where you really don't have to worry about hooking
it up to your PC to "sync", update the system OS version, figure out the
settings for something techie and confusing, or use iTunes (my God, iTunes) to
do anything.

Can you imagine what a Chromebook-iPad hybrid device could be like, with the
automatic updating of Chrome, syncing system of Chrome, familiarity of Chrome,
but the polished user experience and app ecosystem of an iPad?

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I love the concept of a Chromebook; however the Chromebook is based on an
assumption: that we are always connected. 24/7/365, and unfortunately I
haven't found that to be the case.

Once that is the case: that I can get an internet connection from dawn until
dusk, no matter where in the country I travel, or heck even what country I
travel to then I would absolutely get a Chromebook. But we aren't there yet.

~~~
bad_user
Being online all the time is not something insurmountable. My mobile plan came
with data included. I have 3G connectivity all the time, for really good
prices too, both on my phone and on my iPad and I live in Romania, not the
U.S. or some other country that's in the top countries when it comes to
Internet connectivity.

And I'm seeing people living in the country-side, on farms, talking through
Skype to their relatives that live abroad, using an USB stick that's
connecting them through 3G, or using a broadband 50-100 Mbps connection
exposed through Wifi. It's totally shocking, given that some of those places
do not have access to cable TV (only through satellite) or to basic utilities
such as marsh gas pipes, yet they have Internet access.

Of course, right now Internet access is a problem, even for us sometimes. The
costs of my 3G connection is enormous when in roaming. Sometimes you lack the
signal and 3G connectivity is not available everywhere, etc... but in 5 years
from now I believe it will be a non-issue.

And Chromebook is designed for the long-run and I hope they won't cancel it in
the wake of Android's success.

There are Chrome apps that are designed to also have functionality when
offline, albeit limited. For instance there is a GMail app in the Chrome store
that's designed to work in offline mode [1]. It's really basic and not
something I would use, being more like a demo at this time.

I was also sad to hear that Google Reader is not working in offline mode
anymore, so now for my iPad I'm searching for a replacement, and because what
I've found in the store seems to suck, I may even code one myself - although I
may just forward new items to my email address and do some filtering in my
email client.

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk/related)

~~~
acqq
"3G connectivity is not available everywhere, etc... but in 5 years from now I
believe it will be a non-issue."

I don't agree: 1) The bandwidth is a limited resource. 2) You can't install
senders in every corner of everything to cover blind spots. If you haven't
experienced both I believe you're using your 3G almost always without too much
moving around and in the area without too much heavy users.

------
swang
I recently left a job that initially gave me a iPhone 3G ~3 years ago. When I
upgraded to a 4S I just transferred the settings over.

When I left I decided to delete my email account because why would I need it
anymore. So I remove the account from the iPhone and went to eat a bagel.

Imagine my surprise when I come back to my phone to call my sister except
iPhone tells me I only know about 8 people.

Apparently the iPhone tied all my contacts with the company account so when I
deleted that, there went all my contacts with it.

No problem right, I'll just retrieve my backup from my computer from the last
time I synced and I'll get my contacts back and then I'll figure out how to
transfer over the contacts.

Except apparently when I got this phone with iCloud it turned off backups when
I synced with my computer. Okay no problem, iCloud should have it right?

Except iCloud has been telling me that it doesn't have enough space to backup
my stuff for weeks. I just assumed that meant my apps weren't getting backed
up, which is fine. But apparently they don't update anything else, even if
you've already backed it up (this is definitely not all Apple's fault, but
iCloud is pretty confusing about its backup rules). Not sure why I couldn't
retrieve my contacts from right before when I deleted them but they were no
where to be found.

So finally I just bit the bullet and synced with an old backup and lost about
3-4 months worth of text messages. Yay.

~~~
jesseendahl
I'm pretty sure that the iPhone asks you if you want to keep a local copy of
your contacts & calendars when you remove an Exchange account, so you may have
hit "No" on accident.

~~~
josteink
It didnt on my old iPhone 3G.

Gone were all my contacts and calendering data, including birthdays.

I had to export my stuff to CSV and massage it in local Outlook and do some
reverse-and-double-wipe sync stuff through iTunes.

It was horrible and I refuse to buy another iDevice ever again.

~~~
jmreid
Sounds like you were using an exchange server for your work, and you were
storing all your information on that server. Could have been avoided by not
storing personal data on your work servers and making sure you have the
settings set to store them on the device itself or MobileMe/iCloud.

This kind of behaviour is probably something businesses like. Info on company
servers stays on the servers.

This isn't an "iDevice" issue, it's a data ownership issue.

~~~
swang
Yeah I too was on an Exchange server. I had no idea it was storing on only
Exchange/that one account. Really hard to discern where it was saving contacts
to, hence why I had about 8 or so contacts left over when I deleted the
account.

------
eli
I have to assume the genius was off script. The shop I worked at had people
sign a document before authorizing anything destructive. We usually imaged the
disk anyway.

Definitely agree with the larger point though. PCs (phones, tablets, etc) are
ridiculously hard to use and unreliable even if you kinda sorta know what
you're doing.

~~~
nsp
I worked at the Apple 5th avenue retail store until April, and there is a
document that has to be signed acknowledging that you could lose all your
data. That said, it's usually framed as a "this probably won't happen, but
just in case"

~~~
mitchty
Back before Best Buy had the "Geeksquad", we had the exact same type of form.
And we framed it the same way, actually had to almost underplay that bad
things could happen.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
It's Geek Squad, and why do you put it in quotes? That's the name of the
company they acquired in 2004(?)

~~~
mitchty
Since I quit I haven't really paid much attention to Best Buy to be honest so
I didn't know the proper spelling.

------
Steko
"I figured that a “Genius” would quickly figure out whether it still had iOS
4, and if so, would just update it to iOS 5 or 6 and then set up iCloud
backup."

Wait but "Updating to iOS 5 will delete all of the apps and media... To
preserve your content, apply this update on the computer where you sync apps,
music, videos, and photos." [1]

[1]
[http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2011/...](http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2011/10/ios-
update-delete.jpg)

~~~
fpgeek
Yes, Marco's figuring was wrong (or at least incomplete).

However, doesn't his expectation sound reasonable (especially for the "it just
works" company)? And isn't the mismatch between expectations and reality one
of his points?

~~~
Steko
His expectation sounds reasonable but part of that is he's not an objective
third party -- he's presumably writing to emphasize the reasonableness.

We really don't know what happened between when his 87 year old grandfather
walked into the Apple store and when he walked out with a restored machine. I
can think of a lot of ways this ends up "just not working". Maybe grandpa used
the word "restore" at some point not aware of it's specific meaning, heads
were nodded and miscommunication happened.

Wife and I were planning to get her mother a tablet to video chat with before
she passed unexpectedly a year ago. Had we done so and had we been in a
similar situation I doubt I would have sent her to the Apple store with only
the words "icloud backup" scrawled on a piece of paper. I mean it's total
speculation but I think I would have had an email explaining exactly what to
do or told her to wait until we were there to handle it.

------
lostlogin
Macro comments that his grandparents don't want/shouldn't have to spend time
dicking around with apple IDs. No one should have to. It's awful. Email, music
sharing, itunes match, App Store, iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, notes, and
likely others. Getting an iOS device or mac to have fully functioning services
usually takes me weeks to achieve (oh, that email account isn't arriving for
some reason) as random things that worked just seem to stop working when
peculiarities of personal account functionality are encountered. Why on earth
the initial setup can't have an initial chance to enter apple I'd one, then a
list of services to turn on. And if for some reason a password reset has to
happen it's just terrible trying to get all the devices in the house working
again (don't lose Apple TV remote...) is hours of work, and is so bad the
password changes are a killer. Please Apple, save us, I'm more than 50 years
younger and I don't want this either.

~~~
chrisbolt
Initial setup does ask for an Apple ID, then sets up most associated services
(App Store, iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, Notes, etc). They fixed that with iOS
6, and no 'random things that worked' broke when I upgraded. I don't use
iCloud email so I can't speak to that.

~~~
lostlogin
That's my main gripe, if you have multiple email addresses that feed into one
account, and like to email out from a variety of addresses its ugly. Really
really ugly. Mainly because iCloud hates you sending a message that doesn't
appear as an apple address. If IOS 6 is better than 5 in regard to initial
Apple ID I couldnt really judge as most my settings carried over from my ios5
install, thankfully, but iTunes Match lost its setup, and home sharing too and
the remote app is now broken for me on iPhone. However if setting up a new
device has been improved/fixed. THANK YOU.

------
ripperdoc
One of the most user friendly additions to software, ever, is the undo button.
(if you want to feel how it is to use software without, try Linux in terminal
for a while ;) ). And one of the best attempts to do this on a OS scale, is
Time Machine. It should be as easy as bringing up a prompt and step or scroll
backwards in time. You are really just stepping between data states. If you
restore a state, it will merge with current state and step forward (which of
course can be undone). You can decide to restore only one app, and thereby
limit impact.

Update, restore, "are you sure you want to do this?", "pick the right
destination", etc are user unfriendly concepts, and will make people nervous.
Auto-update apps, but let people undo. Make restores undoable. Change "are you
really sure?" to "don't worry, you can always undo".

Of course, you could argue, this will waste storage space. Well, with a good
diff algorithm to rely on, not really that much. And even if so, you can
always merge older states together (e.g. the detail of change is mostly
relevant to very recent events - a few weeks back, I only care about major
things like when I deleted all my contacts and didn't realize until now).

~~~
ripperdoc
And to add a few points: \- When you don't have network access and the device
is at the limit of storage space (so that a major state changing operation
couldn't be undone), for the love of god, get the user to connect it first.
Let it back up it's state to computer or network. Don't allow situations which
cannot be rolled back.

\- A lot of apps and iOS features sync with the network. Will need a little
work to make sure a restored local state doesn't interfere with the network
state. It's solvable.

------
guelo
The whole iDevice ecosystem is complicated. I've seen even tech savvy people
suffer data loss or prolonged inconvenience. A lot of it is caused by bad
design and buggy software, but a lot of it is also caused by Apple arrogantly
throwing up intentional roadblocks.

~~~
dm3
I consider myself technical, but when recently faced with a task of backing up
contacts from an iPad to iCloud - I got scared.

The iPad had an iCloud account set up. It was unrelated to the current
device's owner, so I couldn't back the device up to that account. There is a
'Remove account' button, but what's going to happen when I remove the account?
Is something going to disappear from the iPad? How am I going to know?

I figured I should back up to the Mac first, then switch to the new iCloud
account and restore if anything happened. I didn't even do that, because the
last backup of contacts from the iPad got lost (probably because there was
another iPad sync'ed with the same Mac) and I wasn't sure what would happen
when I sync'ed it this time.

Maybe technical users tend to overthink these things, but data loss does
happen and the current Mac's ecosystem is indeed confusing in that regard.

~~~
Angostura
Similarly, I consider myself technical but the whole iCloud syncing business
on iOS and OS X Lion (may have improved in ML) is a mess and I managed to lose
documents. Syncing has to be turned on and off in multiple places with non-
intuitive descriptions of what may happen.

Turning syncing off warns that data will be lost (huh? I don't want you to
delete anything, just stop syncing the two data sets).

Tis all a muddle.

And then backup. You have to choose _between_ backing up to this computer and
backing up to iCloud? Why? I certainly don't trust iCloud with my only backup,
but having it as a remote adjunct would be handy. Why can't I back up to both?

It's horrible.

~~~
rkudeshi
There is one way to back up to both iCloud and your computer. First, set up
automatic iCloud backup. Then, whenever you plug in your iOS device, right-
click on its name in the iTunes sidebar and hit 'backup'. It will do a one-
time backup to your computer.

It's not perfect, but it works really well for me. Daily automated backups to
the cloud + backups on my computer whenever I update the OS or upgrade
devices.

------
karpathy
I have a flipped perspective of this. In my experience, Apple tries to be too
clever and does many unintuitive things behind the scenes so that "it just
works".

I went through a horror scenario that scared me when I bought a new iPhone and
my old pictures and videos for some reason did not sync over to the new
device. I thought for a few brief moments that I lost 2 years worth of
pictures and videos and that was enough to scar me permanently.

I now periodically back up all my pictures/videos from my iPhone and iPad to a
folder in my Dropbox. Seeing all the files listed out in my folders gives me
comfort, because I know there's no attempts at cleverness going haywire in the
background, erasing and moving things around when I click "yes" or "no" to
some popup question that I don't fully understand.

So I'm not sure what the right answer is. Sometimes I wish it wasn't as much
magical as completely transparent about what's happening. Maybe there could be
some nice UI that shows exactly what is stored, and people could somehow drag
and drop data between devices?

~~~
Adirael
You can use the Dropbox App to do that for you, it will sync your media with
your Dropbox automatically.

I think in this sync issue DRM is at fault. Sync between old iPods and iTunes
worked that way because music was DRM'ed and they didn't want you to give your
friend your 40GB iPod and let him copy all your music. It has been carried
away too long, there should be two way sync.

This is a special pain in the ass when you have more than one Mac.

~~~
karpathy
Ah! Definitely not using Dropbox app to do the syncing for me automatically.
Again, too much magic for something too important. I can't be guaranteed that
the Dropbox app maybe somehow loses authentication and silently stops syncing,
or maybe I edit a photo on iPhone and its filename is unchanged in the
filysystem and it doesn't get synced over, or anything similarly weird and
technical goes wrong.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but all I want is a perfect and completely
transparent guarantee that I have a complete snapshot of my most important
files. I'm willing to do the little manual work for it.

------
norrishung
Its possible that oversight here was on Marco's part and not the Apple
Store's. If his grandfather had told an Apple Genius that "he wanted to make
sure he could transfer his stuff onto a new iPad in case this one ever broke",
chances are that the Genius would have known what he was talking about.
Instead, Marco doesn't trust his grandfather to explain that coherently and
has him write down the cryptic words "ICLOUD BACKUP". To be fair, those words
don't mean much by themselves and I could see why the Genius thought he was
doing the right thing.

~~~
josephcooney
So, as per usual, when apple stuff doesn't work it is the user's fault. Right?

~~~
norrishung
I hate how everyone immediately takes every comment as pro or anti apple on
the web. Im not trying to defend Apple here. My comment was more about taking
responsibilities for your own actions before immediately blaming someone else.

~~~
yozmsn
"he wanted to make sure he could transfer his stuff onto a new iPad in case
this one ever broke" You realize that you're suggesting a hack, this is not at
all what he wants to do, he wants to use his iPad with all the stuff on it.
Maybe Marco should've suggested "ask them to make a backup before they do
anything as they should be doing anyway"

------
jarjoura
The iPhone since its first version will only ever pair with one iTunes
database on one computer. Although, yes, you can still backup your phone to
any computer with iTunes, just on restore you won't be able to reinstall apps
and music until you sync with the original computer. This is a political
policy put in place and not any kind of limitation of iTunes Sync. I and
several people have filed Radars on it over the years explaining why this was
a bad policy but it always went into the black hole that is iTunes Radars
saying "By Design".

The issue is moot now that you can back your phone up to iCloud completely
avoiding the iTunes step. It's slow and could be costly if you have a lot to
backup, but at least it moves things in the right direction overall.

~~~
yottabyte47
I bet it had something to do with media licenses/contracts.

------
chj
Honestly I never trust Apple with iCloud. Still need to do backup with iTunes
regularly. I wish iOS has better integration with Dropbox because I trust it.
But again, if Apple takes over DB, then I would lose my trust. This guy isn't
for web service except for music/app downloading.

------
jpxxx
The lesson is as clear now as it ever was: users must not be responsible for
managing user state.

~~~
DividesByZero
Users want to be able to manage user state.

~~~
jpxxx
You and I do. Regular people don't.

~~~
DividesByZero
Can you please elaborate on this? Perhaps we have a different definition of
user state.

~~~
jpxxx
Sure. Let's start with an iPad.

iPads have physical state: shattered, powered, glitchiness, temperature,
cover, location they're in, way in which they're being held, etc...

iPads have hardware state: processor, CPU, RAM, GPU, storage available, etc

iPads have software state: booted, OS version, OS mode, current app, volume,
what the app is doing...

iPads have user-state state: songs, contacts, high scores, the way the apps
are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other videos, FACEBOOK,
emails, signatures...

We know all of these things. An iPad is a small flat touchscreen PC with some
prissy software and expensive accessories and most anyone in the tech involved
world can distinguish between all of these layers and figure out what's wrong
when something's wrong.

For the tech uninvolved, there's no real distinction between any these states.
The iPad _is_. The iPad is, for lack of a better word, an appliance. It is a
thing they bought to do _iPad_.

“Hey Marco, I had the iCloud put on my iPad. Now I can’t even do anything with
it."

It is no longer an iPad. The user-state-state is gone because of a
misunderstanding and there's nothing that can be done to retrieve it. The user
doesn't care how, why, whatever. iPad is not working.

What Apple is doing with iCloud is removing maintenance and reducing the
chances of catastrophic loss of user-state-state. They are further ahead than
basically anyone at this point, and had iCloud been running on the iPad in the
story, it would have been near impossible for that iPad to become a non-
working iPad. It backs up all of these things:

( Purchased music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books Photos and video in the
Camera Roll Device settings App data Home screen and app organization Messages
(iMessage, SMS, and MMS) Ringtones )

and quite a few more datatypes they don't advertise in a strong legal
construct that allows Apple unbelievable flexibility and ability to make
products that do things as expected. It is egregiously hard to delete an
iCloud, even if you try.

State is a service. SIAS. State As A Service. Make whatever acronym you want.

~~~
DividesByZero
So you're suggesting users shouldn't have control over "songs, contacts, high
scores, the way the apps are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other
videos, FACEBOOK, emails, signatures" ?

~~~
jpxxx
No, I'm saying they shouldn't be responsible for where those things are or how
to get them back when they aren't there anymore. Hence, "management" or
"maintenance". I'm not quite sure what word I'm looking for.

------
sgdesign
I'm pretty good with technology compared to the average person (or at least,
those whose job description does not consist of spending their whole lives in
front of a computer), and even I managed to wipe out a lot of my iOS data when
simply _switching to a new computer_ (thankfully I had done an iCloud backup
in anticipation of things going wrong and was able to restore. Still lost one
app's data in the process, for some reason).

We definitely have a long way to go, although I think a lot of the stuff we
put up with is also due to accommodating external forces like backwards
compatibility, pressure from the music and movie industries, etc.

------
DividesByZero
I think as time goes on, the digital divide won't be focused on inter-
generational (gramps can't use the internet) issues as it is now. Instead, the
focus will shift to first VS third world, and rich VS poor.

Generational issues will decay over time as the population becomes made up of
a greater proportion of 'digital natives', but the gap between rich and poor
will still exist. We should take the lessons we learn here and try to apply
them there when the time comes.

------
codelust
While Marco has written specifically about iCloud and the iPad, what he
describes is not limited to just everything Apple. My father recently turned
70 and he has a PC at home which is used for listening to music, browsing and
a lot of CAD. He started using computers much before I did, but he did not
grow up with them and still finds it hard to deal with GUIs. It has always
baffled me as to how someone who was excellent at using the CLI can struggle
so much with what is meant to be easier. I am talking about ease, not
efficiency.

And it is not that he's not a sharp cookie anymore. He runs the household,
still consults on his civil engineering projects, tinkers frequently with
various things electronic/electrical, but GUIs stump him and his predicament
has only gotten worse with the newer iterations of operating systems. For my
generation, who grew up with the modern computing paradigms, this is
unfathomable, but it is a real problem too, one with no real solution.

I have found my eventual solution in doing Teamviewer sessions for most
problems. It is heartbreaking to make aged parents feel incompetent because
they can't seem to grasp easily the same concepts we can grasp without even
half a thought.

------
klapinat0r
While I agree completely to Marco's post, I also want to point out, what I
believe is, the underlying root of evil: "The iPad is easy" (or the X is
easy).

Expecting that something is easy and always works is not that helpful, and to
some extend removes responsability from the consumer (which is great for the
consumer in the short run).

It doesn't help that we (techies and others) use catchy phrases such as "It's
easy" to convince people to give it a try. Because, for some, it _will_ be
difficult.

When you tell older generations about something "new" (email, smartphone,
tablet, whichever) and they're hesitant or slightly sceptical, it's easy to
hear yourself giving the argument: "But it's easy, you just have to...".

Don't say "but it's easy" in cases where you should've said "but it's easy for
me".

Should the iPad experience be better? Sure, and I'd love to see them continue
to strive towards it. My point is the other end of the equation: the
consumers.

------
pooriaazimi
I recently had a problem with corrupt file system ( _that's what I initially
thought, but right now I think the disk is dying_ ). Anyway, what I did was
re-partition my 750 HDD and installed Mountain Lion in another volume. Then, I
copied "~/Music/iTunes" AND "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync" folders
from the (supposedly) corrupt ML to the new ML, and the next time I attached
my iDevices to the Mac, they synced back without a problem and I didn't lose a
single item. Of course, I also had iCloud sync set up before hand (and now I
learned that I can use both the iCloud and manual backup to my computer, which
is extremely convenient).

It was a little off-topic, but I just thought sharing that little story with
others might be beneficial. I searched a lot before doing that but couldn't
reliably verify I can move my Synced data between multiple installations, so
maybe others in the same situation find it useful.

------
ksec
Thx, I hope this get pushed up to front page. And prove my comparative theory,
Apple will know they happen to be good only because their competitors are bad.

I think we need some rethinking into the whole mess of sync. It is not easier,
even for some technically minded individuals.

And may be someday Apple could charge $50 or more per iDevices and have iCloud
Backup as standard. No more messing around with iTunes Sync. And my friends
wont cry when her iPhone has been stolen and lost all the pucs she took over
the years.

------
pmuk
I've just upgraded from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5 using iCloud backup. I
assumed it could do everything that an iTunes based backup could do, but I was
wrong. It didn't backup any of my audiobooks - so I have to buy those again,
and it wiped all my Google Authenticator codes.

------
drivebyacct2
Oh iTunes, you are hilarious.

