Setting up iCloud backups

Go to the iCloud settings and choose Storage and Backup. Make sure iCloud backup is set to “On.”

According to Apple, this is what’s backed up: Purchased music, TV shows, apps, and books; photos and video in the Camera Roll; device settings; app data; home screen and app organization; messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS); and ringtones. Apple’s mantra is anything that can be re-downloaded isn’t backed up, so your apps and any apps that have downloadable content aren’t stored in the cloud. If you have large amounts of app data, like PDFs in GoodReader, you may find yourself going over your free 5 GB limit. Naturally, if you do want all that data backed up, you can buy more storage: 15 GB is $20 per year; 25 GB is $40 per year; and 55 GB is $100 per year.

To specify which app data is or is not backed up, while still in the Storage and Backup section of the iCloud settings, click on Manage Storage and then your iOS device. Here, you can specify which apps iCloud backs up, and which it doesn’t.

iCloud backups happen whenever the device is plugged in, on a Wi-Fi network, and locked (meaning it’s at the Swipe to Unlock screen). If you want to check when the last backup was, or force a backup, at the bottom of the Storage and Backups screen there is a Back Up Now button.

Restoring from backup

Right now, backups and restores are done on the assumption you’ve either replaced your device, or your whole install is so messed up you had to nuke from orbit. The only way you can restore data is from the setup screen on a fresh install of iOS; you can’t just restore the specific data from a single app you accidentally deleted. This will be less of a problem once apps are updated to store their own backups in iCloud.

To reset your device, under General, choose Reset, and then Erase All Content and Settings. Your device will be restored to factory conditions and you will be prompted with this screen.

Restoration is a two-step process: first the device settings are restored, then all apps are re-downloaded from Apple’s servers. The restoration happens in order: the first app on your first screen is the first app to be re-downloaded. If you want to prioritize an app, tap on its icon. According to Apple, the restore will attempt to download the same version of the app that you had installed previously. If that version is no longer available, the latest version of the app will be restored instead.

The Aftermath

After doing several restores this weekend to try this out, I found the process relatively smooth with few surprises. I did have to re-enter a few email addresses. These all seemed to be Gmail addresses I had set up as Exchange accounts. However, it didn’t tell me which Exchange server it needed the passwords to. I also had to re-enter my iTunes password and my Game Center password. All fairly minor inconveniences. It did lose that I was syncing wirelessly to my MacBook, so I had to set that up again. I also recommend letting the Wi-Fi re-download from Apple’s servers completely (and not switch to iTunes syncing for apps) to ensure everything comes down clean. If you’re in a restore state, it’s best to limit the variables.

What’s nice is if you suffer a critical failure on the road you can get yourself up and running easily. This is great if your iOS device dies; you can swap it out at the Apple store and restore from backup while you’re there.

It’s important to make sure when you do this you have the time to check out that everything restored properly. It would be embarrassing to need to restore your device before a big presentation and find out the hard way Keynote or your specific presentation didn’t restore properly.

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App issues

Clearing hung apps

Sometimes you get lucky and it’s just an app that’s frozen. If this happens, tap the home button to get back to your home screen, and then double-tap it to bring up the task bar. Press and hold on the troubled app to enter edit mode, then click the minus icon in the upper left. Confirm the app closure and try relaunching the app. Remember when Steve Jobs said, “if you need to use a task manager, you’re doing it wrong?” Well let’s just pretend the multi-tasking bar isn’t actually a task manager.

Reinstalling apps

Fortunately, iCloud makes reinstalling apps very easy. Delete the app that’s behaving badly by pressing and holding on the icon until it started shaking, then tap the X. Then, open the App Store app and go to Updates and then choose Purchases at the top. This will bring up a list of all the apps you’ve purchased. Find the app you want to reinstall, and press the cloud icon to the right of it. Enter your iTunes password and the app will be reinstalled. Make sure the app doesn’t contain data that isn’t backed up elsewhere; it could be lost in the reinstall process.

iPhone issues

Forcing a reboot

While Apple loves to say “it just works,” the truth is, sometimes it just doesn’t. An app might have totally locked up the iPhone, or the gerbil inside went on strike and won’t run on his miniature hamster wheel anymore. If that happens, your first recourse is to force the iPhone to reboot. To do this, press and hold the sleep/wake button for about three seconds and you’ll be prompted to reboot your iPhone. Then press and briefly hold the sleep/wake button to turn your iOS device back on. If you’re really stock, you might have to press and hold both the sleep/wake button and the home button for around 10 seconds to perform a hard reset.

It’s amazing how many issues this solves. Since iOS tries to do its best for memory management, I’ve found periodic reboots help keep things snappy.

Restoring the iOS via recovery mode

This is the iOS version of nuking from orbit. Things have gone so horribly wrong you need to wipe the device and start over. It may be because your device is constantly rebooting, an iOS update failed, or something just went haywire. To put your iPhone into recovery mode follow these steps:

1. Turn off the device as described above. Also, plug the iPhone’s USB cable into your computer, but don’t plug it into the device.
2. While pressing the home button, connect the USB cable to the dock connector. This will bring up the “Connect to iTunes” screen.
3. iTunes will launch and tell you the iPhone is in Recovery Mode and needs to be restored. Click Restore. Hopefully, this will bring your device back to full working order.

The future

iOS 5 promises to make recovering from system failures easier. With the new PC Free feature, if you do need to restore your iOS device, it can be done from an iCloud backup  – assuming you’re on a Wi-Fi network. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this feature and report on how well it does, or doesn’t work, when the new iOS is released this fall.

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Why You Should Encrypt

Encrypting your backups means that you’re taking security of your personal information such as email account passwords or contact information one step further. It won’t be enough for someone to simply get hold of your computer and look through your iPhone or iPad backups, since they’ll need a password to use them.

Encrypting your backup also protects other people from accessing the location data which is stored on your iPhone. The log of location info is backed up along with everything else, so encrypting your backup is a way to stop anyone from looking at the data. Of course, the location data probably isn’t going to help anyone much, but if you’re worried about it, this will help.

There are other, non-security related reasons to encrypt your backups, too. If you restore a new iOS device from a backup of an old one, usually passwords such as mail account passwords aren’t stored, and you’ll have to enter them again on the new device. However, if your backup was encrypted, the passwords will be kept, making the transition to a new device that much easier.

How to Encrypt Your Backups

It’s incredibly simple to start encrypting your iOS backups. Connect your device to iTunes, then click its name in the sidebar. Navigate to the Summary tab and at the bottom find the section called Options.

The last checkbox in this section is labelled Encrypt iPhone (or iPad) Backup. Check that box, and a dialog will appear asking for a password for the backup. Enter a password and click Set Password. I don’t suggest ticking “Remember this password in my keychain”, since that defeats the purpose of setting a password in the first place. (Saving the password in the keychain means that it is saved on your Mac and will be entered automatically). Of course, you may wish to tick this anyway, since to access the keychain, you have to enter your computer’s password.

Now if you try to restore a device from the backup, iTunes will ask for the password, meaning only you can use the backup for anything useful. Plus, the data in the backup is encrypted too, meaning it won’t make any sense if someone somehow opens it without using iTunes.

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iPhone Photo Library

The good news is that you can access the iPhone photos you’ve taken from any Mac (and not just the one you sync with) using the OS X Image Capture app. In fact, you can even use the iPad Camera Adapter.  The iPhone itself will look like any other camera that you connect to either your Mac or your iPad. You also even use iPhoto or Aperture directly to perform the transfer. Some of the techniques outlined below can also be used to directly copy image files off of the iPhone when importing from iPhoto fails.

iPod Music Files

Ever since the arrival of the iPod, there have been ways to extract music from your Apple device. These same utilities are still applicable to the iPhone. The tricky part is that the files and directory structure are not represented in human friendly text. There is a database file that Apple uses to translate the gibberish back into the artist, album, song format you are familiar with.  Many of the free solutions like Macroplant’s iPhone Explorer, will allow you to copy the music files directly from the iPhone to your Mac in the nonsense naming format they are in on the iPhone.

So long as you have iTunes configured to “Copy  files to your iTunes Media folder”, as well as to “Keep iTunes Media File organized”, then the file names will all be restored once you have imported the music back into your iTunes Library.  It will retrieve the names of the artist, album and song from the ID3v2 tag embedded in the music file.

Other free solutions like HeadLightSoft’s DeTune (formerly know as expod) will perform the translation before you transfer the files. There are other paid solutions like FadingRed’s Senuti for $18.99, which are also quite good at what they do. But for the money, DeTunes offers a more than adequate solution if all you want to do is recover your device-locked music.

iOS App Data and More

Sometimes you may have to get app and data regarding iPhone usage from your phone to your computer outside of iTunes. While you can use Macroplant’s iPhone Explorer to perform this task, I have found that their Pod to Mac product for $19.95 delivers more value.  Also in this category, and my personal preference is Ecamm’s PhoneView also for $19.95. Both Pod to Mac and PhoneView offer a way to access SMS Messages, VoiceMail, Call History, Contacts, and Calendar information.  They also offer solutions to access your Photos, Media Files and even the locally stored files for each app you have installed.

Secret Location Data

There has been a lot of press regarding the storage of location information in the consolidated.db file on your iPhone. Apple recently revealed that it actually provides a database of cell and Wi-Fi tower locations in and around where you use your device, but the info is still interesting. While not part of a formal product offering, there is a crude yet effective tool called iPhone Tracker on GitHub that lets you see it.

Extract From Backup

Sometimes something has happened to your iPhone and you need to extract a file from your iPhone backups. This includes accessing any photos you had on your iPhone at the time of your last backup. There are two utilities that I use to perform this task, SuperCrazyAwesome’s iPhone Backup Extractor which is a free utility, and addPod’s Juice Phone, also free.  Neither solution will work if you have encrypted your backup files. Both allow you to access the backed up data as if the iPhone was connected to your Mac.

So until Apple comes up with a solid cloud-based solution for iOS products, the fact remains that all iOS devices are just satellites to their Mac hosts.  And so long as you need to sync between your Mac and your iOS device, there is a chance that either your Mac will fail, or your iOS device will fail.  The above solutions will have you covered until Apple comes up with a better solution of its own.

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Snow Leopard’s release is just around the corner, so here are some quick and easy steps to make sure that you are ready to upgrade.

Turn On Time Machine

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to turn on the Time Machine built in backup. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great first line of defense against data loss.

Make a Bootable External Drive

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone your Mac’s hard drive to an external USB drive as an emergency backup, in case both the upgrade and the Time Machine backup both go south. The real point of both this step and the Time Machine step are to backup, backup, backup! Get your data off of your computer and onto something else that can be saved in case of the worst.

Get Rid of Haxies

Haxies are unsupported hacks that alter the appearance or functionality of OS X. While they can be cool, and nothing against Unsanity, anything that’s done under the covers or outside of what Apple says is OK to play with is easily broken during a major OS upgrade. Application Enhancer has been a known culprit in the past, and some developers will ask that it be removed before support or ignore crash reports that involve it all together.

Disable Bundles

Bundles like SIMBL are also a sort of hack that can cause problems during an upgrade. As I said before, they are a good hack, but a hack nonetheless, and can cause unforeseen problems during an upgrade.

Sync Up

iPods, iPhones, MobileMe, any third-party devices or syncing that you have set up…make sure they are all synced and up to date before starting the upgrade procedure.

Update Your Apps

This shouldn’t be that big of a deal as long as you are already running Leopard, but it’s still a good idea to check and make sure that you are running the latest released version of your apps. Developers who joined the Apple Developer Connection as a premier member have had access to Snow Leopard for a while now, and have hopefully worked out the bugs in running their app. That being said, upgrade your apps, just to make sure. I’ve found that it’s also a good practice to download updated installers for your favorite apps and burn them to a CD or DVD for quick access.

If you are feeling daring, you may want to give AppFresh a look and see about having it update all of your apps for you.

Clean House

Have a ton of old apps laying around that you don’t need anymore? Now is the best time to AppZap them! I seriously do not understand why AppZapper, or some similar functionality is not built into OS X. Both Cocktail and Onyx have functions to clean out temporary files, check permissions, and ensure that the OS is in good operating order.

Watch the Clock

Snow Leopard is set to be released in September 2009, which as the writing of this happens is just around one month away. Snow Leopard brings with it the opportunity to make your Mac “Better, Faster, Easier,” than ever before.

Have a favorite OS X upgrade tradition? Sound off in the comments!

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I’ve spent most of my career working in IT Operations, a good part of which I’ve spent thinking, “Really, what’s the worst that could happen?” A year or so ago, I asked myself, “What’s the worst that could happen if my MacBook died?” It was a pretty sobering question.

I work full time. I also freelance, go to school, and write fiction part time. The best case would be the failure was during a rare moment of idleness, and I could suffer the loss of a computer without breaking a sweat. But what’s the fun in that? Data disasters don’t strike in moments like this; instead, like a formulaic movie plot, they happen when you’re not only on deadline, but one you’re really late on. Planning for a system failure I pray never happens has led to what’s admittedly an overly cautious backup strategy. Most people think they’re being very cautious if they’ve got a secondary backup method; I’ve got a tertiary backup.

My primary backup is Time Machine, and it has served me well through the usual accidental data deletions. While the interface drives me a little batty, Time Machine is an excellent backup method. Hourly, I’ll hear my drives spin up and can smile knowing the drivel I’m writing is safely backed up. Every now and then I’ll get the dreaded Time Machine backup error, but either forcing the backup or just waiting for the next cycle works fine.

Time Machine, though, only works when I’m attached to my USB devices at home. I use my laptop at work and at school, so if I need to do a restore when I’m not at home, Time Machine is useless. Not only that, if my house burns down, I’m out of luck. As a secondary backup, I use Mozy. Now, the first backup is extremely long; depending on how many gigs you’re backing up, you could be looking at a week’s worth of time uploading data. Once that’s done, subsequent backups are very speedy. It only backs up changed files, so you’re not uploading hundreds of gigs of files every day. It’s easy to configure your backup sets — you can either tell it to grab your Documents, Pictures, Music folders, etc., or you can go deeper and tell it to backup (or exclude) specific folders. Mozy also runs in the background when your Mac is in an idle period.

My secondary computer is a PC. Each of these backup schemes work as long as my Mac is intact or I have another Mac to restore to. Time Machine obviously is Mac-only, but while Mozy works on Macs and PCs, the file that’s restored is a .dmg file. While I could find a way to break into the .dmg file, part of my worst-case plan is, “OK, my Mac is dead and the only way I can make this deadline is to keep working on my PC, STAT!” There are three folders (School, Freelance, Writing) that I have deemed Crucial National Assets. Without immediate access to those folders during a State of Emergency, I am completely and totally hosed.

To solve that worse-case scenario, I use Dropbox. Dropbox simply uploads what I want to a web page, where I can grab files from any other computer, Mac or PC. The one drawback is it likes its files to reside in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, but I got around that by creating symbolic links to those three folders I really care about. Dropbox grabs their contents and uploads them.

An important part of any backup routine is testing data validity. Periodically, I’ll do test restores from Time Machine and Mozy, and verify from my PC that I can access the data on Dropbox. While you’re likely to only need them in case of emergency, it’s important to know if you have to break the glass and use the tools they’ve been doing their jobs all along.

What is your backup strategy?

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One of the most sought after applications since Leopard was released has finally been updated.

Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper! backup application received a big update today, with the biggest feature being that it is now Leopard compatible.

For many, SuperDuper! has become somewhat obsolete with Leopard’s Time Machine feature, but other users who would prefer more control over their backups will enjoy the flexibility SuperDuper! offers.

SuperDuper! is free for regular use and $27.95 if you’d like to enable some of the more advanced features.

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However, many of us would also like ways to change the frequency of its backups. By default, Time machine runs once an hour, saving a daily backup at the end of the day and a weekly backup at the end of the week. This behavior continues until the drive it was pointed to is full, at which point it begins to delete the oldest backups. Almost immediately, people wanted a way to change the frequency – even if, like me, half the reason was the annoyance of those bright-blue, flashy LED’s on the external hard drive as it spins up every hour in the middle of the night.

An earlier hint at Mac OSX Hints had users editing a .plist file to change the frequency of backups. This hack consisted of editing com.apple.backupd-auto.plist, specifically the following lines:

StartInterval
3600

A change to that integer value – which is in seconds, by the way – and Time Machine would theoretically back up on your schedule, not Apple’s. However, that seems to cause more problems than it solved, in my experience. Specifically, now Time Machine backs up whenever it likes. (It seems to be about once a day, give or take an hour or so, not once every three hours, as I set it to be.) Upon inspection, it appears that the file’s permissions are broken. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility hangs, and attempting to manually do so, even on a duplicate, causes Finder to crash.
…Let’s just say that method is Not Recommended, then.

Alternatively, there is now this – Time Machine Scheduler.  Time Machine Scheduler does not meddle with the .plist files – it simply runs its own daemon to create a backup.  It can be set for any length of time between 1 and 12 hours, as well as optionally running a backup upon loading.  You have the option of either installing Scheduler and its daemon, in which case you do not need to open TMS, or simply running it from the .app when you want to make a backup. It is also fully compatible with existing Time Machine backups – the preference pane will show that Time Machine is off, but it reads the TMS-created backup and date of last backup without trouble.

There is also the option to mount and unmount the Time Machine backup drive automatically, although I have not tested this.  (I have a partitioned drive, and the other partitions are in frequent use, so I don’t bother.)

This method works very well for me, at a reliable three hours.  It takes the same amount of time to run backups, as well as to load and unload the normal Time Machine interface, and, thank heavens, it actually does it every three hours.  Why Apple didn’t include the option to change the backup frequency all along boggles me.

I will note that a third way to do this is to use Lingon to edit the plist files.  I have not tried it, but I thought I would mention it, for  those who might be interested.  How about you?  Have you tried Lingon?  Time Machine Scheduler?  Did the original .plisthack work for you?

(Time Machine Scheduler and Lingon are both free utilities, available at the links above.)

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