Restoring
Posted: Fri 29 June, 2012 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Technology 3 Comments »So, while the insurance bullshit rumbles on, I went to the local Apple store tonight and sorted a replacement phone. Apple sell replacement phones for ‘out of warranty’ replacements. (a much nicer terminology than “water-fucked phones”, to be fair) Apparently they’re made from some reconditioned parts, but that means they cost £140 to replace, not £500.
The entire process has actually been really simple. I know I’m no Apple advocate, but sometimes they’re worthy of praise all the same – just not brainless adoration.
In this case, the actual transfer process took about fifteen minutes, start to finish. Restoring all the data is taking a long time, but it looks like I’ll have a complete restore, that I won’t have lost a single thing. And that is impressive, however you look at it.
All my contacts, all my email, even all my photos. (which were the thing I really expected to lose) This is A Good Thing, for sure.
I find it so reassuring to have everything backed up on the computer, especially phone numbers and my diary. I’m reassured to know that if ever the phone is lost I don’t have to fork out full price for a new one – though I am insured too, and when my iPad’s screen was cracked I got a new one for just the £25 excess.
Agreed, whilst I’m an Apple fan, they aren’t perfect. But when their stuff DOES work, it can be quite ‘amazing’, having restored a few phones in the past it still catches me that… it’s all right there where it was!
The restore was actually really impressive – I’d expected to lose ‘unimportant’ stuff like photos etc., simply because I hadn’t backed them up – I certainly didn’t know they were in Cloud backup (other than PictureStream, or whatever it’s called)
But got everything back really smoothly, and for that I was impressed.
Only thing that isn’t (IMHO) impressive is that iTunes warbles a warning now if I try to do a non-Cloud backup of contacts etc. That’s annoying – although not as irritating as Vodafone’s decision to axe Zyb (which was the dog’s for contacts backup) which became Vodafone 360 (and was shite). Zyb made things dead easy on anything with SyncML (so not Samsung) for doing the same thing – and you’d got a nice usable online version that you could download easily.