Upgrading iPhone to 3G, Restoring iPhone, Backup iPhone

What nobody seems to mention when you upgrade your iPhone to the 3G version is that you have to back up and restore your phones in a particular way. The issue arises when you have got a 3G iPhone that has an older firmware version on it and when you have iTunes set to automatically sync your device.

Backup of the old phone is simple – you plug in to your computer and iTunes creates a backup. This is not a problem, and you then go about changing the SIM card to the new phone and pugging that one in to iTunes. It is recognised as a new phone and so you go through the process of setting it up, however you find that it has an older firmware version than your previous phone. SO you go to ‘Restore’ and it tells you that you can’t – that you need to upgrade the firmware first. That’s OK, you think – you can restore later.

However, you *must* remember to turn OFF the auto syncing from in your iTunes preferences (under ‘Sync’). Otherwise the new firmware will be installed and the new phone will have new settings in place.

Turning off the auto syncing allows you to then choose the ‘Restore’ option you want.

If you don’t remember to do this the chances are that you’ll have a new iPhone with none of the photographs, wallpapers or other files on it. If this happens don’t panic – go into iTunes and turn off the auto sync, then restore the phone (removing all the new stuff iTunes has just loaded) and *then* you can use the restore feature.

Works a treat… eventually! If only the set up allowed for this and an appropriate warning was put on screen… it would have saved me 40 minutes!