iOS warning

I spent 7 hours trying to upgrade to iOS 5 last night. Eventually, it worked and I have the new firmware, but it is a shame that it came at the cost of everything on my iPhone.

Despite having taken forever to make 2 backups last night, when the restore portion of the update process came to pass (at about 1am) it failed. It gave me an unhelpful message, so I went to manually find my backups. Both folders were still there, but they were empty.

My RSS and Twitter are full of similar stories, and, even worse, tales of bricks. The official (?) line is that the Apple verification and activation servers are struggling under the load. This is only going to get worse with the 4S being launched tomorrow. I really would leave it for a while, if you want to avoid the risk.

I am definitely not trusting my iPad to the process. Losing my phone's contents was annoying, and a time sink, but losing my iPad's contents would be disastrous.

Another note: if you activated gestures on iPad 1, which involved either a jailbreak or a Mac, that option will no longer exist on the iPad 1. I'm waiting for an untethered jailbreak and a hack for gestures on Cydia.

My iPad was bricked I have an appointment at the Apple store to get it fixed today.

Yeah, the servers must be hammered.

I thought for a while that I'd bricked my phone, but it ended up restoring from backup just fine once iOS5 finally installed.

All my stuff seems intact, but it didn't run too smoothly for me either. Restoring failed and then it said I'd lose my media. Thankfully I didn't, as far as I can tell. Even if it had, it would just have been boardgame rules in PDF.

Thanks for the heads up, spider_j - I'll wait it out. I'd rather be assured of a solid upgrade than even a small chance existing of bricking my iPad2.

Yeah 5 ate all my settings and game saves during the install. I was only slightly upset by loosing something like 10000 coins in Coin dozer... now I have 40. I doubt I'll be playing that game ever again.

My process also failed, but I found that restarting the install AFTER rebooting my PC (not a Mac, btw) got everything going again. All-in-all, it took about 5 hours. I thought for certain it had frozen up again during the re-installation of the Apps, but it finally pulled through and completed.

Just about as poor an upgrade process as I can imagine though. Absolutely no feedback from the device as to what is going on, and dreadfully slow. Why they do not have an option to download the entire "upgrade" first, and then start it, I do not know. At least that way you would know that everything was on your PC, and the slowness was not because of the fact that it was downloading one bit per minute from Apple.

Isn't the 4s shipping with the iOS5? In that case, it shouldn't get worse.

sheared wrote:

Why they do not have an option to download the entire "upgrade" first, and then start it, I do not know.

You can manually apply updates by downloading the iOS5 ipsw from here or other sources.

I went that route and still encountered 3002 errors from the servers being slammed. No data loss though.

Yeah, it should never be "bricked," you can always get it into a restore mode by doing the DFU/recovery mode stuff: http://www.hackint0sh.org/f137/54082...

In that mode, iTunes will recognize it and offer to restore to it.

The biggest issue is that the servers were overloaded; if you keep trying, it will eventually work.

My rule is to give all Apple updates at least two weeks before installation; a month is better. Worked well for me so far.

sheared wrote:

Why they do not have an option to download the entire "upgrade" first, and then start it, I do not know.

iTunes gave me that option on windows.

If you back up the phone first, then install/restore if it gets bricked like Ranger Rick describes, all your data should be okay when the upgrade finally completes.

Otherwise the best advice would be to wait a day or two for the servers to stop melting.

I updated over the weekend thanks to the Lifehacker post, and haven't any problems with iOS 5 or iCloud.

I installed it yesterday without any huge issues. The only goofy thing for me was iTunes seemed to hang when it was restoring my files. The iPhone wasn't showing that anything was going on, so I just unplugged it. Everything seemed to be fine on it and iOS 5 was on there. However, when I plugged it back in, iTunes asked if I wanted to continue restoring files to which I said okay. That took awhile and it oddly showed that I was 2GB or so over my memory limit while it was restoring the files. It eventually finished, though, and everything was fine. The correct amount of space being used was displayed.

So far, the improvements seem very nice. I like the camera being available from the lock screen and that volume up button working for the shutter.

I'm also going to wait at least another week until their servers are not crawling like they are now. I tried last night to update my iPad2, but I was getting errors that the server was timing out and I gave up.

Never mind, it was to do with the mute / lock setting.

I updated my iPad yesterday evening, no problems other than it erased my apps and I had to re-download them.

It was ok tho, for some reason they all kept their data and I didn't lose anything, just had to re-download them. I did the "iCloud" backup and everything seems fine now =)

Took time this morning to update my iPad2 and everything went swimmingly.

Another note: if you activated gestures on iPad 1, which involved either a jailbreak or a Mac, that option will no longer exist on the iPad 1.

So Apple deliberately turned gestures off on the iPad 1 to "encourage" you to upgrade? Really?

Updated my iPhone 4 last night. No problems.

updated my devices.. both had all their apps wiped.. but I was able to just restore them back.. kinda a pain though since I lost all my folders (again!)

Gravey wrote:

If you back up the phone first, then install/restore if it gets bricked like Ranger Rick describes, all your data should be okay when the upgrade finally completes.

Otherwise the best advice would be to wait a day or two for the servers to stop melting.

I updated over the weekend thanks to the Lifehacker post, and haven't any problems with iOS 5 or iCloud.

That was the problem. I checked that the backups were there before e update, but when I tried to restore, the directories were still there, but the contents had been wiped.

I eventually discovered that Sync Service wasn't working properly, after spending several hours trying to get my contact lists from my iPad to my iPhone.

Sparhawk wrote:

Isn't the 4s shipping with the iOS5? In that case, it shouldn't get worse.

From what I read, the activation part of the process had problems due to server load. Lotsa activations today.

Yeah, I lost my Puzzle Quest 2 savegames... probably the end of playing PQ for me until PQ3 comes out.

If you have an iPad 1, you will also lose your multi-touch gestures.

https://plus.google.com/111666959095...

The ridiculous part about the iOS update was that for whatever reason the update tried to contact Apple at least twice in less than minute for two separate verifications. I tried several times to get iOS 5 on my phone, and it would usually fail on the first attempt, and than during my 2nd to last attempt it failed on the 2nd call in. I think that is what is causing the overload at apple. Imagine millions of people trying to ping Apple for this verification than having to do it a 2nd time 30-45 seconds later. It's boneheaded!

I thought I had bricked my phone on that 2nd to last attempt because it had disappeared from iTunes, and the iPhone appeared to be on but just showing a black screen. I unplugged it after a few minutes and plugged it back in, iTunes found the phone and asked if I wanted to recover the phone using my backup. Thankfully I had done a manual backup before trying to do the update and I made sure my phone had synched everything with iTunes before that. During the recovery iOS 5 was installed and all my settings etc, were recovered from my backup. So yeah I finally got iOS 5 but it was a pain in the ass.

I hate that I can't use Siri. Not sure why the iPhone 4 isn't capable of running it, it looks pretty cool and I would most certainly use it.

Edwin wrote:

If you have an iPad 1, you will also lose your multi-touch gestures.

https://plus.google.com/111666959095...

I read that is only disabling the four finger swipe to switch apps because it caused problems due to the low amount of RAM in the iPad 1. All the usual gestures like scrolling, zooming, etc will work fine.

Malor wrote:
Another note: if you activated gestures on iPad 1, which involved either a jailbreak or a Mac, that option will no longer exist on the iPad 1.

So Apple deliberately turned gestures off on the iPad 1 to "encourage" you to upgrade? Really?

They never actually turned them "on" in the iPad 1, due to memory reasons or something. As far as I know it's just the "claw" gesture to multitask, which you can do with a double click on the home button.

I lost at least one app - GTA Chinatown wars. Downloading it now. If you've got lots of stuff, do a quick check to see if *everything* is there.

Has anybody upgraded their 3GS? I'm keeping mine around as basically a fat iPod Touch but I'm not sure if I want to upgrade it to iOS 5. It was already starting to run a little slow after the last couple of updates.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

Has anybody upgraded their 3GS? I'm keeping mine around as basically a fat iPod Touch but I'm not sure if I want to upgrade it to iOS 5. It was already starting to run a little slow after the last couple of updates.

My wife upgraded her 3GS and said it seems a bit slower, but not unusably or annoyingly so. Certainly not as bad a 3G running iOS 4.

I upgraded my 3GS from iOS 3 to iOS5. Yep that's right, I never installed iOS4. I lost all of my contacts, which was annoying. Besides that I have noticed it is a little slower, like a second or so pause when you open Mail, maybe a little stutter when unlocking. Things like that. Once in an app though it seems fine.