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, 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’s iPhone – 07/10/08, and Richard’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
