Apple Gets iPhone Recovery Right

Well, you know I'll bag Apple if I think it's screwed up. And a couple of months back I did so when an iPhone recovery process wiped all my data. (That I believe was just before the 2.1 update which I believe fixed that bug.) But it's also right to give credit when credit is due. And Apple has fixed that problem and done a damn good job of it.

When I started making notes for this piece I thought it was going to be a rant similar to the earlier one. But then about half way through my disaster, the sun came out, a rainbow appeared in the sky everything was wonderful.

So what's the story?

Eager to get onto Phone OS 2.2 (despite there being few new features), I clicked the upgrade button and waited as the download began (and waited). About two thirds of the way through the two hundred plus megabyte download, it packed it in, complaining it the server was no longer communicating or some such.

That was a fault most likely attributable to my end, as I have had some connection problems. Although, on the other hand, it was about half an hour after the update was announced, so it's quite possible the Apple servers were overloaded.

At the time I assumed it was probably not a good time to be trying to download as every man and his dog (and I guess woman and her cat) would be trying, and it was around midnight my time, so I went off to bed.

Never mind, I thought, I'm sure it will resume where it left off when I retry... 

Next day I tried again - and found to my annoyance that it restarted from zero. But this time it did at least successfully download the whole update; however, then it all hung. The iPhone simply displayed a message indicating I should connect it to iTunes. I tried unplugging and replugging etc, but no luck.

Not wanting to have to re-download the whole thing again (I do have limited GB per month on my broadband plan and a third attempt would start to put a dent in it) I searched everywhere on my hard drive to find it, figuring I could just run it again once I found it. But no luck.

Oh, and then iTunes crashed. Eek! On restarting iTunes, it told me my iPhone needed to be restored. Double eek! After my last experience I held my breath and pressed go.

Some time later my iPhone came back to life. In iTunes I noticed, much to my surprise, that it indicated I was now on OS 2.2.

Now lazy programmers would have simply restored the last known OS, but Apple obviously weren't lazy, and coded to detect the new OS waiting and used it. Well done, Apple.

Of course, there were no apps on my iPhone (besides the Apple ones), so I was still a bit nervous. But then a sync kicked off and it indicated it was installing my apps. I think at this point I stopped holding my breath.

I will mention one little bug. The feedback in the iTunes status window disappeared. My concern wasn't helped by the iPhone not indicating it was syncing either. The only indication I had that it might be doing something was a spinning icon next to the iPhone's icon in the iTunes sidebar. And also, if I went to the last screen of applications on the iPhone, occasionally a new one would appear.

Eventually, everything restored and my iPhone was back to normal. Well, almost. Now, all I've got to do is reorganize 94 icons on my iPhone. Doh! There's something I wish the iPhone would remember.

Regards the 2.2 update, as I said earlier, there's not much to get excited about. Street view would be good if I could work out how to use it - it's certainly not intuitive - or maybe not enabled Down Under. But I do love (and it was on my wish list) that the home button takes you to the first page of apps.

But I was disappointed there is no copy&paste. For the first time, I actually would like to see copy&paste, as I would like to blog on iPhone Matters using my iPhone, but it's quite a chore without copy&paste.

So, huge thanks to Apple for both fixing the earlier problem where data might get lost in some scenarios when restoring, and for making the update process recover smoothly and without a hitch.