So my iPhone has been really buggy recently.
It won’t let me re-install several programs that had disappeared at the last iPhone firmware upgrade.
I even tried deleting them on both the iTunes and iPhone end, even going in and removing the applications from the iTunes folder. However, when I re-download them from iTunes and then try to sync them I get an “Unknown error” message. If I try to install them from the appstore on the phone it appears to download and start to install, the progress bar gets all the way to the end, and then it fails giving a message that the application can’t be installed on the phone and that I have to use iTunes.

So I’ve decided to take the nuclear option and do a full restore of the phone and see if that helps anything. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t help. I also won’t be surprised if the iPhone doesn’t restore my data properly like after my firmware upgrade.
But I’ve created a duplicate copy of the backup folder to give me some measure of safety (since Time Machine is defective by design and doesn’t back up that folder).

Wish me luck…

I just lost some critical data from my iPhone. Time Machine should have saved me, but it didn’t.
Read my email to Steve Jobs for the whole story.

On Sep 14, 2008, at 6:19 PM, Wifall Richard wrote:

Steve,
I’m writing this letter to let you know of my recent disappointment with using Time Machine (with Time Capsule) and how it failed to backup and restore some critical files.
Time Machine is billed as a device that makes it so that “you’ll never have to worry about backing up again.” Unfortunately, in my moment of need, Time Machine didn’t work.
It was not able to restore some files that I need because it decided not to backup those specific files. In other words, it didn’t even do it’s job, while giving the appearance of working.

In particular, Time Machine doesn’t back up the MobileSync directory which is where all of your iPhone data is stored. I have some critical data on my iPhone that I appear to have lost due to this problem.

I’d ask you to please change Time Machine so that it does back up this directory so other people don’t run into the problem that I have.
I also would ask that you improve the iPhone restore process so that people can restore data from any of their backups. (Which you can’t right now)
Finally, and most importantly, I also would appreciate it if you have any ideas of any other ways that I can recover my data. If not, I would appreciate some type of compensation for my Time Capsule not working.

I just want to scream with frustration as it appears I won’t be able to recover my data even though I thought I was taking the necessary steps to protect myself.

Here is my story:

The upgrade:
On the night of Sept 13th I decided to upgrade to firmware 2.1 (This is an original iPhone that I bought at the iPhone launch)
I made sure to sync my iPhone before upgrading so that all of my data would be backed up. (Even though everytime you sync the iPhone it says that it is backing up your data I later found out that you can’t actually restore that data)
I then selected to upgrade my phone.

The problem:
After the process finished I noticed that some of the applications were missing from my iPhone. In particular, I had bought a password application called SplashID where I store all my critical passwords and it was gone. I started to get a little scared, because it contains critical information that I don’t have anywhere else.
I went into iTunes and saw that SplashID was still in iTunes, so I tried syncing the phone again.
This didn’t fix anything.
I then went back to iTunes and selected “Get Info” on the application. When I did this, it said that it couldn’t find the application, and provided me a file dialog box to find it. I knew that the applications are stored in the iTunes library, so I found the app in the “Mobile Applications” folder within the iTunes folder.
I then synchronized the phone again and was happy to see the application was now on the phone.
Unfortunately, when I ran the application, all of my passwords were GONE! Now I was really starting to get nervous.

The iPhone backs up, doesn’t it? Not really.
I remembered that the iPhone claims to be backing up my data every time I sync, and I sync quite often, so all I should have to do is restore one of those backups.
I went to iTunes and selected “Restore from Backup…”
For some reason, despite the fact that I sync nearly every day, only three backups were listed: iPhone, Richard Wifall’s iPhone - 07/10/08, and Richard Wifall’s iPhone - 07/13/08
Here I made a mistake. It was late at night and so for some reason I misread 07/13/08 as 09/13/08 and thought it was the backup from when I had synced earlier in the day.
So I picked that backup and restored it to my iPhone.

I then went to my iPhone and saw that SplashID had some of my data but it was very old and missing a lot of data. I then realized that I had restored the wrong backup.
I tried to restore from the iPhone backup, but it just put me back in the situation I had been before with the data gone.

Time machine should have been my hero.
Now I was really starting to panic as I thought my data might be gone, but I knew that I had one more trick to pull. Time Machine!
I could just restore the iPhone backup directory from yesterday, then restore the backup on my iPhone and everything would be fixed.
So then I went into Time Machine only to find that the directory isn’t backed up. I did some research on the internet and discovered that Time Machine specifically is set not to backup this directory.
To be quite honest, I was disgusted that a product that I bought to backup my computer, didn’t in fact back it up.

So now here I am, not knowing how to get my passwords back for my banking, trading, and computer accounts. About 81 passwords gone. I guess I just am going to have to pay the money and time to manually reset / change all these accounts.

There is one last hope? In the iPhone backup directory there are .mdbackup files that appear to be from previous sync’s (i.e. they have the timestamp)
One of these appears to contain the data for my passwords, but I don’t know how to get it back on the phone because when iTunes restores, it only uses the most recent data. (And the data is encrypted so I can’t just look at it on the computer and reenter the data manually)

Thank you for your time.
Again, if you could put me in touch with someone who could help me restore the old .mdbackup files to my iPhone I would be very grateful.
But for now, the only conclusion that I have is that I shouldn’t trust Apple products. (Which is disappointing given the investment I have made in Apple products)

Richard

I loaded up iTunes today. It showed that I had one application that had an update available for download. (In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen this not say their was one update available for quite some time.)

I clicked on the link to show me the available update and it proceeds to the “My App Updates” screen where it shows that I have something like 47 updates available. It shows all the updates, and some applications show up in the updates list multiple times. Huh?

I looked in my iTunes folder and many of the applications have duplicate copies that appear to be the same (i.e. they are the same size).

So near as I can tell, updates for iPhone applications are completely hosed for me. (On a side note, on the phone it shows 2 application updates available. Three cheers for inconsistency!)

And I’ll leave you with a screenshot of the fun:

iTunes iPhone Application Updates

Once again Wordpress provides a first class blogging experience. I just downloaded the iPhone Wordpress app and am writing this post using it.

Setup only requires your name and password and you are ready to post.

You can work on your post, save it as a local draft and post it whenever you are ready.

Pictures can be added from the iPhone library or from the camera.

Finally, you can see a preview of the page at any time.

That’s all the features. Simple, functional, and well done.

Highly recommended.

Update:

On my blog the uploading of images doesn’t work quite right. It puts the picture in a different directory than it references it from.

Update 2:
This is a bug in the application. Basically it doesn’t respect the “Store uploads in this folder” parameter if you have changed it from the default. So if you are having a problem with the Wordpress iPhone application and pictures showing up in your posts make sure that you have that set to the default setting (It can be found under Settings->Miscellaneous).

My wife got me an Apple Time Capsule for father’s day.

The Time Capsule is a network device that is supposed to work in conjunction with Apple’s Time Machine backup software to backup your computer wirelessly on a regular basis. It also serves as a 802.11n access point that I’ve been using to provide access to our laptops.

Ever since I first installed it I’ve had problems with Time Machine not working very well. I hooked up my laptop via ethernet for the initial backup (which is large) and then switched to 802.11n for the incremental backups. However the incremental backups never seemed to be working correctly. It would spend hours just trying to start the backup (”Preparing” stage), and then an equally long time doing a relatively small backup.

Finally, yesterday my wife told me that that our slingplayer wasn’t working at all with her laptop in the bedroom.

Sure enough, despite having a strong wifi signal I was seeing a large number of packets dropped. In fact, I was seeing these when I was quite near the Time Capsule.

Could this be the problem with my Time Machine backups as well?

After a lot of troubleshooting I ended up doing a hard reset. (Unplug the power cable and plug it back in while holding down the reset button). This completely resets the firmware settings, but doesn’t affect the harddrive (or the backups on them).

I then reconfigured the Time Machine the way I needed it.

Since then it appears to be working much better. I’m not seeing packet loss, the backups seem to be working and the slingplayer is working.
Hopefully this does the trick.

So iPhone 2.0 has been out for a week now.

What do you think?

There were three main reasons that I was anticipating the new firmware.
- Activesync for work.
- VPN for work
- App store so that I could finally transfer all my passwords from my Treo to my iPhone and get rid of the Treo

How have my expectations been met?

Activesync:
Mail works great. It does exactly what I would want. Give me easy access to my work mail without having to go through webmail. And you can even easily disable the mail syncing, so if you have days where you need to turn off work it’s not that hard to do.

Calendar and Contacts however are disappointing to me. I like to keep my work contacts and calendar separate from my personal contacts and calendar. As far as I can tell, you can’t do this. Bummer, because I really wanted easy access to my work calendar.’

VPN works great. Cisco IPSec with two factor authentication works exactly like I would expect.

Finally, the app store and a password application. I bough a program called SplashID. It could use some improvements in the interface department, but it does the job, so I’m fairly happy with this.

Biggest disappointment? The new long backup times (Which is apparently due to backing up applications)

Biggest positive surprise? The Apple remote application actually is useful for me.

Today I plugged my iPhone into my computer to make sure it was synchronized and all backed up nicely before I go on a business trip.

iTunes started up like normal, but for some reason it didn’t start the sync process. I clicked on the iPhone in iTunes and instead of showing the iPhone page it shows a full window advertisment for Apple’s MobileMe service.

Now I’m not against advertising. I think it’s a perfectly good way to help pay for products. However, when advertising completely interrupts the normal functionality of a device I think it’s gone too far. Often I will insert my iPhone for a sync and then walk away to do something else. Later I’ll come back, grab my iPhone and head out the door. If I had done that this time, my phone and data would not have been safely backed up like I would have expected.

Apple released information on it’s iPhone SDK on Thursday. You can sign up to be an iPhone developer on their website.
They also released info on their Microsoft exchange support for enterprise email and calendar. They are accepting applications for businesses that want to participate in their iPhone Enterprise beta program.
They now will be supporting Cisco VPN and Microsoft Activesync. Yay!

On the SDK front it features the same dev environment as Mac OSX. Including Xcode, remote debugging, remote profiling, and even an iPhone simulator.

Getting a new program up and running on the simulator is pretty easy, especially for those of you who already have experience with objective c programming.
You can download the SDK and starting messing around without needing to drop the $99 to become an official iPhone developer.

There are a few things that I think are important that I haven’t had a chance to determine yet.
Does iPhone support obj c 2.0 and garbage collection? My assumption is yes but the samples don’t seem to use garbage collection at least.
I also want to know how data files are transferred from iPhone to PC as part of sync. I.E. How can a mac app access data saved on the iPhone?

Support for all of this is coming as part of firmware 2.0 which won’t ship till June. Hope you have some patience.

Back in January, my friend Ben sent me a link to this innovative game called Cursor 10, but I never got around to posting about it.

It’s a great use of time as a key game play element.

If you are at all interested in video games, this is one that you are obligated to try it out.

While I’m on the topic of video games, have you played EA Sports GameShow?

If you like sports trivia or sports talk radio, this is the game for you. It has a live DJ, sports trivia questions based on current events, and best of all, it’s free!!

To download it, go to http://www.eagameshow.com

If you want see what it’s like, check out this funsize version. It’s not the full game and doesn’t have the live questions and DJ, but it will give you a good idea of what the game is like.