The other day I was at the Apple Store with my mom to help her get the iPhone 4S. She asked the clerk-geek if she should restore her phone from her backup and he said “no.”
We were shocked. Isn’t that the standard procedure. According to him, not anymore. With iCloud and iTunes syncing it is actually an inferior method.
His reasoning was that if you restore your phone then anything corrupt will be loaded back onto the phone. Instead, you should sync all of your apps and data with your Mac laptop and then restore your phone from that data. Or, in the new version with iCloud you can restore from that data (with no syncing needed).
Of course, this only works if you have a Mac laptop.
It took me a while to figure this out. Apple likes to make everything simple and effective and in this case that would be cutting out the annoying and time sucking process of backing up. If you follow that then you see that all the latest iOS developments were leading up to this.
Which is great because syncing and backing-up an iPhone was a miserable process. The only problem is that current users have long established habits we need to break. For example, I actually had to open my Mac Mail App and set-up the notes feature. This allows you to back-up your notes and over iCloud it’s automatic.
The same is true for the other apps I rarely use: Calendar, Address Book, iPhoto, iVideo, Bookmarks, and Apps.
All together this is a brilliant move by Apple. It makes their closed system extremely useful when in the past it was simply too time consuming to use. I’m in the process of setting all this up and I’m loving it!