Upgrading is always stressful – be it a computer, an Oracle database or an iPhone. There’s always a good chance for lost data and lost time dealing with complications.
So yesterday I picked up a new iPhone 7 from Verizon. The pickup was seamless. I had signed up for an upgrade program when I got the iPhone 6, so now I just walked in, gave them my old iPhone 6 and they gave me an new iPhone 7. It’s bit scary giving up my old phone before restoring to my new phone, but I had a backup AND I asked Verizon to please not wipe my iPhone 6 for 24 hours incase there were upgrade errors. They normally wipe the phone immediately.
The day was off to a good start. It only took about 10 minutes to get the phone and I had taken a full backup of my iPhone 6 the day before and thought I’d plug in , restore back up and wow, that would be easy.
I get back to my office, luckily just a couple blocks away. Plug it in, try to restore the backup and it asked me for a password. I’m like ‘rrr’! The day before when I had taken the backup, I saw that the “encrypt” checkbox was filled and thought about taking it off, but then thought, “well it’s probably more prudent to leave it on”. Of course the backup didn’t ask me to verify my password. It just took the backup.
Now in order to use the backup, I had to know the password. The day before when it took the backup, I was thinking my computer had it cached, or else why didn’t it ask for the password when I took the backup?
So now I had to figure out what the password it was. I tried all conceivable passwords I could think of. My name space of passwords is limited to about 3 core, 10 common and 20 rare passwords. I tried them all. It wasn’t my Apple ID password which it should have been. It wasn’t my iPhone 6 number code. It wasn’t any of the 20 passwords I’ve used over the past several years.
OK, fine. I’ll go back get my iPhone 6 and take a new un-encrypted backup!
I go back to the store. To their credit they gave me my old phone in a couple of minutes and it was back to the office.
I go to the backup interface, seen above, and try to un-check the “Encrypt iPhone backup”.
This is where it gets fun.
*** No ***
you can’t uncheck the Encrypt! What has been seen can never be unseen.
To uncheck the box you need the password. If I knew the password I wouldn’t be unchecking the box.
So now I *** CAN’T *** take a backup (at least one that is usable)! Thanks a lot Apple. Are you serious?
It’s my iPhone, my computer, I’m using everything on both and Apple won’t let me take a backup of the iPhone on the computer!
From Apple:
Unbelievable. There is no way for me to backup my iPhone 6 so I can upgrade to my iPhone 7.
Are they serious ??
The work around is to backup to the iCloud which doesn’t need the password. Does that make sense? Can we say slow, insecure and inefficient?
Backing up my 64G iPhone 6 to the iCloud is a recipe for a huge waste of time.
So I go through and blow everything away on my iPhone (so much for a good backup) until I’m down to about 6G and then backup to the iCloud. Of course, I have to buy more space on the iCloud to do this. rrrr
I bought more space, I backed up the iPhone, I went back to Verizon, switched phones again, back to the office, restored from iCloud and it worked. Of course I’m missing all the photos, music, books and apps I rarely used. Now time to put that stuff on back by hand.
Some parts of the upgrade are magic, but this part blows me away. Why? Why so much pain? Just to force me to buy some iCloud space for a day?
What a frustrating waste of time from a company that prides itself in easy powerful user interfaces.
First, why can’t you turn of encryption of backups once chosen?
Second why not use apple ID password ?
Third, why not alert the user every time they take an encrypted backup asking for password? No point in taking the encrypted backup if you don’t know what the password is.
Comments