Lollipop Local

My iPhone had been asking me to upgrade to the new OS5 operating system for weeks.

Every time I plugged in to the computer to recharge, up would come the reminder as part of iTunes.

As someone who is involved in mobile marketing, it is vital that my hardware runs the most up to date systems so that I can keep up with all the latest developments.

But I’ve been caught on upgrades before and thought that two months would be a suitable amount of time to allow for all the bugs to be ironed out and, with everyone raving about the new iPhone 4 S with Siri, I thought I would see what the new interface of the OS5 had to offer.

Secure in the knowledge that I had backed up a couple of weeks before, I followed the instructions to the letter.

Only to be faced with the message that my system was unable to restore back up.

I tried again but got the same message.

Over and over again.

And, all the while my business mobile was offline to potential customers.

It was weird because all my music and apps were still showing on iTunes but the two machines didn’t seem to be able to link together.

Searching online, the only help from Apple was via a paid option – I was going to have to purchase some customer service for a fault resulting from something that they had persistently asked me to do.

Which is when I noticed the hundreds of sad messages from people who were in a similar situation, stretching back over the past two months.

From my own experience, the problem still wasn’t fixed… and yet Apple continued to advise people to upgrade without any conditional warnings – which I find quite reprehensible.

Following the instructions from various forums, I tried to get stuff back from the icloud but there was nothing there. I tried switching machines on and off.

I tried accessing the back up that I had taken but the back up that they had taken as part of the upgrade had been overwritten across my old version. Delving inside, I could still see some files with the October date but there was no way of knowing what they were since they all had numerical titles.

Eventually, I was left with no option if I wanted to use my phone – I had to select the install as new iPhone option.

Which then wiped my phone of everything. Contacts, music, photos, apps, emails… all gone.

I was able to retrieve my music and apps by resynching the phone with the iTunes on my laptop.

But my photos were all gone and so were my contacts.

Familiarising myself with the new interface, I found the button that would retrieve contact details from my SIM card and so I was able to get back some family and friends who had been registered on the previous Sony Ericsson phone.

But my business contacts for the last year have all disappeared and there seems to be no way of retrieving them.

Thanks Apple!

Some people tell me that they have been able to complete the process successfully but, from what I saw on the internet, these lucky individuals are few and far between. Here is a tale with pictures of the procedure for one chap’s attempt to upgrade iphone to os5

So, if you’re thinking about upgrading your iPhone 4 to OS5, please ensure that you take a back up and then store it somewhere else on your computer – not in the files that relate to Apple or iTunes. At least then you may be able to get some of your stuff back if it does go awry – although I still have not seen any instructions on how to retrieve your data from external back ups.

At a time when Google’s Mobile Marketing strategy with Android phones is starting to eat into a market share that was once dominated by Apple, I foresee a lot of people making the switch to the alternative platform.

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Tags: iphone

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Mobile Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.