I didn't lose not 1 app. Because after the restore I chose to restore from backup instead of "new phone". I have everything, pictures, contacts, apps, even my home screen was the same.
I'm not sure were both on the same page or even having the same problem. Let me break down my problem.
1) I have no backup files on my PC. I had none prior to the release of iOS5. My mistake really, I should have backed up the night before.
2) With 1) in mind, I have to attempt to backup my device through iTunes now.
3) However, the problem with 2) is that the backup is taking forever to complete. I have not managed to get it to complete a backup. I left it for half an hour and the progress bar did not even budge a bit!
4) If I choose to restore, without backing up, then that will reset my device to factory default and install iOS5. That is absolutely fine, but I will not be able to restore as I don't have a backup!
I'm going to assume you already had an older backup done prior to iOS5 which you restored to.
Problem is, something is a miss which is causing iTunes to not complete a backup and I don't know what. It doesn't spit any error messages out, it doesn't even crash, it just goes on for what seems to be infinity attempting to backup but the progress bar does not budge.
THIS IS NOT ISOLATED TO THE iPHONE4. I'm having the exact same issue on iPad2.
I'm assuming one of two things.
1) I have apps on my devices which are causing the backup to fail/stall
2) The process of backing up accesses Apple servers, which are under extreme load
Or it's something I have absolutely no clue about.