Accidentally deleted Pleco from iPhone -- backup headaches

[Paul Duke]

Okay, so this is really annoying...

Somehow while in the supermarket tonight here in Beijing (ie, lots of items in my arms... and must have touched the iPhone screen randomly), I deleted Pleco from my iPhone. In other words, without looking I touched the icon until it "shimmied" and then somehow -- what bad luck! -- hit the "x" button to delete it.

Okay, I know how to reinstall it, but what about my couple of years of flashcard files... text files I am reading, settings, etc?

Go into iTunes and just click Restore, right? No, no, no, not that simple. When I click "restore" first it checks the software version... I guess I am running 6.1.2 and the current version is 6.1.3... okay so iTunes wants to download the new version (800+Mb, not a fast download if you know anything about the internet in China), and then restore...

Okay so the download starts... in the meantime, it seems, iTunes backs up the iPhone -- backs up the iPhone in its CURRENT state, with Pleco deleted. And as you probably know, in the iTunes preferences panel, only ONE backup is kept.

Okay, so I search around the 'net to try to figure out how to grab a previous iPhone backup from Time Machine (which I run regularly). I go in and restore the iPhone backup file from the previous day. Then I restore the iPhone from the backup (which still has the post-deletion time stamp, but I'm assuming that Time Machine has put the older backup in the place of the newer, useless, backup). Result: seems I'm wrong, backup does not restore anything.

So, trying to put it as simply as possible: can I restore Pleco from an earlier Time Machine version of my iPhone backup (because the latest backup is post-Pleco-deletion and thus doesn't include any flashcard files etc), and how do I do that?

Seems this is a real flaw in Apple's backup and restore logic... if they only keep one backup... and if that backup is done automatically when I connect my iPhone to the computer... how do I deal with a situation where I want to restore something that is in the backup but has currently been deleted from the phone???

Thanks,

PD

 

[mikelove]

We're addressing this somewhat with our planned use of iCloud for flashcard sync. They won't let us use iCloud for document sync, though (several apps have been rejected for that recently) but we're supporting Dropbox at least, and doing so in what we think is a relatively seamless way that would let you basically just keep everything on Dropbox and not worry about officially downloading or uploading things. But of course that requires reliable access to Dropbox, which can be problematic when you're in China.

Anyway, both of those things would give you data that persisted even in the event of accidental deletion, though with iCloud there's an extra dialog when you delete an app in which you could potentially tap on the wrong button and still end up losing your flashcards.

As far as backups, though, if the time stamp is wrong then it sounds like Time Machine didn't actually restore the device backup correctly - are you sure it's being kept on your computer and not on iCloud? Any chance that Time Machine might have renamed the backup file (since it would generally have the same name as the newer one)?

 

[Paul Duke]

Well, I'm guessing the issue is simply that I needed to restart iTunes to have it recognize the restored backup folder... I restored the backup folder again to a date a few days ago, then restarted my computer, started iTunes, and the backup was now correctly identified as being from a few days ago. Restored the iPhone and downloaded all the Pleco extras and dictionaries and my flashcards are back, at least as of a couple days ago.

One thing I am still confused by -- I know this is not a Pleco issue -- is the way in which iTunes automatically updates its backup when I attach the iPhone. I found that by moving quickly and canceling the sync I was able to stop the creation of the new backup. But it's really a bit of a pain if you are connecting your phone to the computer specifically in order to go back to a previous backup. As now configured, the older backup is deleted automatically before you have a chance to get to it. (Unless you cancel the sync, as I said -- but canceling the sync is actually a slightly confusing process as the response to clicking cancel takes 15-20 seconds -- at least with my iPhone 4 and iTunes 10, which I don't want to update because iTunes 11 removes some features I use constantly in DJing...)

Thanks for the reply!

 

[mikelove]

Ah, I'm glad it turned out to be something fixable. I'm pretty sure nobody at Apple fully understands how iTunes backups work