Recently my itunes said my Touch couldn’t sync because I needed more free space. I had just added a couple new apps so I thought one of them must have been bigger than I thought. But deleting them, and a few more, didn’t help. I deleted a lot more stuff but still itunes claimed I needed about a gigabyte more space. After trying everything I could think of, I got mad, and did a restore. In the process of adding everything, a little at a time, I realized itunes was trying to add pictures from the wrong folder and that was the reason I “ran out of room” before. Instead of syncing the 180 megabytes of pictures I wanted it was trying to sync 1.07 gigabytes of pictures from a different folder, the pictures folder under my user-name, but I have been syncing with a pictures folder on another drive. I can only believe that when itunes did it’s last version update it reverted to the default pictures folder and I didn’t notice because it never happened before.
But it’s too late to go back now and I’ve been reinstalling apps, and calendar and alarm settings, and e-mail and every other setting that I set up over the last few months, all in one day. So here are a few things I’ve learned, and maybe you can learn from my mistakes, and save yourself a headache or twelve.
1. Don’t Panic! It’s on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for a reason. If I had double checked a few more things, maybe I would have seen that itunes was trying to sync up ten times more pictures than usual, and that would have saved me a whole day of restoring.
2. Back up! Yes I know itunes does a backup when you sync up, but that wont save you after you restore and realize the notes you made in the notes app and your high scores in games(if you care about them) are gone. Check those streaming radio apps in case you hand entered some url’s for stations and don’t have them anywhere else. If possible or necessary sync up your contacts and calendars and bookmarks in case you hand entered anything since your last sync up with external apps. Look for anything on your iphone/touch that isn’t saved somewhere else so it can easily be found when you need to re-enter it.
3. Where Was That? You might want to take screenshots of each page of apps so you can tell where they where before you restored, in case you liked your layout, and want to replicate it. This can also remind you which apps where on the device and which were just kept in itunes. If you put any bookmarks as icons, on one page or another, a screenshot might be just the reminder you need. To take a screenshot, hold the reset button(on top) and push the home button. When you see the white flash, you have a picture in the saved picture library. Repeat that for each page, and don’t forget to save them off of the device, you can e-mail them to yourself, if you don’t know how to get them another way.
4. What Was That Setting Again? Explore your settings, and make a note of how they are set, because there are a bunch of them and you wont remember them all. Did you set up a VPN? What were those settings? many settings are obvious and easy to remember, but save yourself the time of looking up how to fix something, and write down a few things.
5. Have A Zen Attitude About The Whole Thing. It’s not a complete meltdown of your device. You might not feel great at the time but you might just get rid of some junk you don’t really want, or need. Do you really need three solitaire apps? How often did you use that fart app that was soooo funny when you first got it? It’s just a phone or ipod, yes I know it’s a nice one, but it’s not the end all and be all of your existence, so lighten up, and enjoy all that free space you have, since you didn’t feel the need to replace the three separate flashlight apps, and the four hours of pod/net/web-casts and TV shows you’ve never never even listened to or watched.
If you have any suggestions I’ve missed, feel free to add them to the comment section below, and I may even add them to the post. If I do I will give you credit, because I’m not a complete tool, no matter what I sound like.
