Open Radar

 
26-Sep-2012 11:38 AM John Brayton:
Summary:

If you back up your phone but don't "synchronize" apps within iTunes, the apps are not backed up. This is a big usability problem for people like me who have no interest in managing apps with iTunes. Aside from development work, my only reason for plugging my phone into my Mac is to perform a backup that includes passwords.

If the user interface indicated that backups don't include apps unless you synchronize those apps, that would have been fine. But I didn't find that out until it was too late. So, I have been downloading apps for hours.

In general, I see several problems with backups:

* If you don't encrypt your iTunes backups, your passwords are not backed up. This is not clear in the user interface.

* If you backup using iTunes, your apps don't get backed up unless you synchronize them. This may be a good way to conserve disk space, but it is not clear in the user interface. 

* The data associated with apps seems to be present even without the apps. This is probably good, but I see  no way to delete that remaining data from the phone to regain space without downloading the app and then deleting it.

* A few months back, I had a hardware problem with my old iPhone 4S. Apple Retail swapped out the phone (which was awesome). Instead of backing up using iTunes, I backed up using iCloud. When I went to restore my iCloud backups, the replacement phone told me that there were no such backups. I later realized that the replacement phone was running iOS 5.0.1(?) and the original phone was running iOS 5.1(?). As a result of the replacement phone running an older OS, the backups were unavailable.  Again, this makes sense, but it was days later before I was alerted that I was running an older OS, and weeks after that before I learned that this makes old backups unavailable.

Potential solutions:

1.  In iTunes, warn the user that backups will not include apps unless those are synchronized. Alternatively, add a "phone transfer" type of backup that simply allows the user to make a new phone look exactly like the old phone as quickly as possible.

2.  In iTunes, warn the user that unencrypted backups will not contain password info. Alternatively, encrypt the password info within the backups using the login keychain.

3.  When looking for iCloud backups, tell the user if there are old backups but that they first require updating the OS.


Steps to Reproduce:

1.  Turn off app synchronization in iTunes.
2.  Back up old iPhone.
3.  Restore from backup to new iPhone.


Expected Results:

Expect the new iPhone to have the same apps and data as the old iPhone.


Actual Results:

The new iPhone has the same data, but no apps.


Regression:

N/A


Notes:

I don't necessarily disagree with the decisions about what is backed up under what circumstances, but it is difficult to determine whether your backups include everything you expect or why they do not.