Thank the One Above for Little Miricles

[Jim Koepke]

My wife's iPad started acting funny and then went totally south.

We went to the Apple Store in Portland, OR and it seemed like it was going to work okay with a new charger and cable.

Of course when we got home it decided to not play nice.

My wife stayed home on the next day. The service rep in the store informed me, they were not made to be serviced and it was time to think of getting a replacement. My wife was catatonic about the idea of losing all of here bookmarks and photos.

A new iPad was purchased, even so Candy was still out of sorts.

Something from working on things electronic in the past told me this wasn't the end. Often an intermittent problem like this responds to being chilled. The old iPad was taken out to my unheated shop and left there overnight.

Currently it seems to be taking a charge and hopefully data recovery will not be a big problem.

Sometimes it seems like the days with tubes and replaceable parts were a little kinder to consumers.

jtk

[Lisa Starr]

Hope you are able to retrieve all her favorites! Good luck

[Jim Becker]

Be sure to setup iCloud backups including having them encrypted so things like passwords are retained. It makes setting up a new device amazingly easy...

[Michael Weber]

My iPad backs itself up to iCloud automatically every night. A backup can also be forced at any time in settings. Recalling it to a new iPad is a part of the new setup procedure. You might want to investigate further. Everything, pictures, apps, contacts, bookmarks, etc are restored during setup to the last backup condition.

[Mike Henderson]

I will also advocate for iCloud backup. It will take your device back to the exact place of the last backup - everything. I've had to use it once or twice.

Mike

[One edit: you will have to reauthorize any credit cards in Apple Pay and re-do all of your Face-IDs on your apps that use it. But that's it.]

[Jim Koepke]

My wariness of using the Cloud may be unwarranted.

A bigger problem with iCloud is all of my email eddresses have been used and it will not let me use the same eddress for a different device.

Now my problem is somehow my iTunes screen has changed to album view and there seems to be no way to switch it back to the original view:

419167 (the View Options item in the menu brings up a box that says "No Options.")

The old unit is at 97% charge so hopefully another way of dealing with it presents itself.

The dang things have Wi-Fi, why can't one share with the other?

jtk

[Jim Becker]

I have quite a few devices on the same account...that said, doesn't your spouse have her own email address she can use? If not you can just setup an iCloud email address or a gmail address to be able to utilize iCloud for device backup.

iOS doesn't have a sharable file system but recent versions allow direct transfer of settings to a new device when the old and new device are in close proximity. The old device has to be on a more recent release than something really old is going to likely have to afford this feature.

[Derek Meyer]

When I bought a new iPhone last year, the Verizon rep took my old one and connected it to their wireless network, and then connected the new phone and was able to transfer all my data and apps from the old phone to the new one. I don't know if he enabled iCloud backup on the old phone or if they have some special method, but the transfer was perfect. I wiped the old phone and donated it to my old place of work (Apple repair center) as it had a scratch on the camera lens.

I back my phone up to iCloud before every update of iOS, but otherwise I don't worry about it. I transfer pictures to my PC regularly so I can free up space on the phone, and I don't store music or videos on it, so I don't have a lot to lose.

[Erik Loza]

My Macbook was stolen in 2018 and recovered (yes, unbelievably). Either the thief wiped the hard drive while trying to crack it or I wiped it remotely, since there were sensitive docs on it. The most upsetting thing was that there were a bunch of photos on it taken by my dad, who had passed away earlier that year. Being the dullard about all things technical that I am, I failed to back up to my hard drive before it got stolen. My wife, however, being the tech savvy person she is, set up family sharing a long time ago and backs up ALL our devices to the cloud. I didn’t realize this and thought Dad’s pictures were gone, so actually began to cry in the Apple store when the girl booted up my mac and the folder “Dad Pictures” appeared on the desktop. Moral of this tale: “S**t happens, so THOU SHALT BACK UP EVERYTHING TO THE CLOUD”.

Erik

[Kev Williams]

Ccleaner has an app called Recuva, I used it once to retrieve a bunch of files I'd deleted, it retrieved all but a very few files, I was impressed- and happy!

-and last Thursday, I noticed "My Book" was missing from my network drives list; it's a 12 year old 1tb external drive that I've loaded with everything personal, years worth of photos, taxes, owners manuals, warranty's... and I've never backed it up... Prior to Thursday I noticed it was acting up, like asking how to open files, which it only does if it shuts down, and I rarely shut it down. Wednesday I thought I'd better copy the thing over to a 2tb external drive I got for Xmas last year, but I got busy... so when I noticed it missing, I found the 'moving' power light was just blinking fast- put the drive to my ear and it ticking in unison with the light. Unplugged and replugged several times all days, same thing. I assumed the drive motor went south, so I got some pricing on data retrieval, could run as much as $900... ouch! So I made an appointment to drop it off at a shop this Monday... So Friday morning around 2:30am we're heading for bed; the house had cooled to 62°, and for fun I plugged the drive in...and the drive light came on and didn't blink-! It was making some funny noise, but about 30 seconds later the computer found it, and all the files came up! I grabbed the 2tb drive from the garage computer, plugged it into the office computer with the Book drive- made a folder "Book Copy", opened the book, selected all, and dragged it to the Book Copy folder, and -- by 11am the copy finished up, all without a hitch. Did someone mention 'little miracles'? :D I consider myself pretty lucky...

And also last Xmas, in addition to the 2tb drive Mrs Claus also got me a 6tb drive. It's been auto backing up all of my WORK files daily. It will now back up the Book files too. And before the weekend is over, my 6tb drive will be settled into it's new home, in the bottom drawer of the the fireproof cabinet over in the corner of the basement. No cloud for me, thank you. 'The Cloud' is nothing more than someone else's computer, and I have issues with that...

[Jim Koepke]

Yesterday with the old iPad between two packs of frozen burritos it was backed up to iCloud. About 8:00pm last night the burritos were getting soft so an ice pack was set under the old iPad.

It took a couple of hours on the phone and about 12 hours to do the full back up. Upon arising this morning at about 5:30 one of my first tasks was to check the old iPad to see how it was doing. It stated the back up was completed at 3:00am.

So another two hours on the phone today with most of it being with a tech who must be new since he had to keep conferring with an advisor until he finally connected me with a senior tech. She was better at understanding the situation and now the new iPad is doing a download of the old iPad's data.

One of my comments to both techs is if Apple made this process easier it would likely save a lot of tech support time.

In the not so far past it was possible to connect two computing devices with a cable and exchange files or even have one mirror the other.

Life used to be much simpler with less sophisticated equipment.

jtk