The Trials and Tribulations on new Tech

I used to be a pretty tech savvy person, and I'd like to think that I'm still reasonably so.

For good or for bad, I find myself in the situation where I keep my tech (phone/computers) for much longer than most folks. This is generally great, as the hardware is better, I'm not running out of storage, the speed hasn't slowed down, etc., Why spend lots of money on new tech if you don't need it yet.

The unfortunate side effect, however, comes when the time finally comes, and you find that you're existing technology is so old and outdated that it's problematic to restore your old files to your new tech.

Case in point: I bought a new iPhone 6s yesterday early afternoon. I have been in front of my computer, on the phone with Apple Care ever since, and I have yet to restore my files to my new phone.

Switching from a 3.5 year old iPhone 5 to a iPhone 6s isn't really the problem here. That can be done (or should be able to be done) fairly seamlessly.

The problem here is that my trusty MacBook Pro (St. Jimmy) is well over 5 years old. It has mostly been running well, except for the last year or so it has, on several occasions, had the screen blacked out on me, randomly. Not good, I know.

So basically, I find myself in need of a new phone and a new laptop at the same time. Boo.
The iPhone won out as I find I use it more often than my laptop on a day-to-day basis. I still use my laptop quite a bit, but I don't rely on it like I used to when I had my web design business.

Yesterday, I had a GREAT experience at the Apple store trading in my iPhone 5 and purchasing a new 6s. That'll be another blog post, coming soon.

I didn't leave my house with the intention of getting a new phone, but rather to go to Verizon and then the Apple Store to see what my options were in purchasing a new phone. Because of this, I had synced my iPhone 5 to my iTunes before we left home, but I wasn't as particular about backing up as I may have been if I had known I was about to wipe out and turn in my old phone. Nonetheless, I did have a backup from yesterday morning at 11:01am on my iTunes, so when I decided to buy the new iPhone at the Apple Store, I was fairly confident that the restore would work.

When I came home, I connected my fancy-dancy new phone to my iTunes. Even before it would give me the option to restore from backup, my iTunes told me that in order to connect to this new device, I would need to update to the latest version of iTunes. I thought I had done that recently, so I checked my version of the App, and saw that it was up-to-date. Then, I went to the apple.com site and downloaded what it said was the latest version of iTunes, and saw that it, too, was what I was running.

At this point, I figured it may have something to do with my Operating System on my MacBook Pro. I hate installing new OS systems onto non-native computers, as it generally slows things down and makes problems on older applications.

I called Apple Care, and they confirmed that:
There is a newer version of iTunes that i would need to connect to my new phone, but my laptop's operating system would only allow iTunes to run an older version. This of course means that I had to upgrade to the newest OS for my Mac, which when I tried to do it the first 3 times, crashed my computer!!

After a couple of frustrating hours, we finally got the new OS (El Capitain) on my Mac, and I was also able to download the latest version of iTunes.

Now, while we were spending hours trying to figure this out, the helpful person at Apple Care helped me restore to an older backup of my phone that I had saved to iCLoud in late October, 2015. At that point, I just wanted to be able to use my phone, and figured that all my data up until Oct 2015 was a lot better than nothing at all. This enabled me to use my new phone for a while while my new OS and iTunes were being loaded on my Mac.

Finally, I had my Mac updated, and I was able to connect my new iPhone to iTunes. The first thing I told me was that I now needed to update my OS on my Phone!! That took some doing as well, as now my Mac was freaking out that it had all these new operating systems and apps on it, and it decided to crash on me a few times.

Eventually, I got my iPhone's OS up to date. By this time, by the way, it was around 7:00pm or so.... I had come home from buying my phone around 1:00.

It was finally time to connect my up-to-date phone with my now up-to-date laptop!! We hit the "restore" button from the 11:01am backup session, and it seemed to go well....

...until it crashed 5 minutes in.

Some variation of this happened for the next several hours, each time as the restore process was about 5 minutes in. Sometimes, it would give me a simple error message of "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because an error occurred" (that's helpful), sometimes, it would crash iTunes and need to restart the app, sometimes it would crash my entire computer, and need to restart. Seriously, hours....

I went to bed around 11:30, but was awoken by my cute little kitty at 2:00am. I figured it may as well check in on my computer.

Nope, still crashing.

This morning, still crashing.

Finally, I had a scheduled call from my third apple care rep at 11:00 today. He walked me through something new, which made SO much sense. He said I was having problems because I had already restored a version (from iCloud) to my phone. Instead, he had me wipe my new phone, and start the Restore from scratch.

We are about 30 minutes in on what is estimated to be a 45 minutes restore process right now. Knock on wood, but it hasn't crashed yet.....

Fingers crossed.

UPDATE

YES!!!

After about 55 minutes, my new iPhone6s was able to be restored with my old data! All my contacts, music, and photos are now in my new phone! Yay!!!!

It took just under 24 hours, from start to finish (minus time to eat and sleep!) but it is DONE!!

Kudos to the staff at Apple Care for helping me out and getting my new phone up and running!!