How much can you backup, outside of a full itunes backup?

[matthirst]

The reason I ask is I plan to restore my phone as brand new, but don?t want to then restore from a backup. My phones been buggy lately (apps refusing to update, generally very slow) which I blame on having gone through a cycle of firmware updates, re-jailbreaks then restore from backups since iOS 3 so would now like to now do a clean restore.

So, how much can I backup outside of the itunes backup? I believe contacts is possible (exporting to gmail, outlook etc) which was my main concern. But is there anything else I?m missing?

 

[sting7k]

That's really all you can do. You can back up media; music, videos, photos, podcasts, etc. And contacts. You can't preserve app data when you restore as new and there isn't really anything else on the iPhone.

I guess you could count the apps themselves but they should already be in iTunes so you don't have to worry about them, plus you can always download them again for free.

 

[matthirst]

I guess settings are the main other thing then, but am assuming the full itunes backup is the only way to go about that?

 

[sting7k]

I guess settings are the main other thing then, but am assuming the full itunes backup is the only way to go about that?

The would be preserved in a restore from back up but not as new.

But, being that the iPhone has such simple settings and not a dozen profiles to configure it takes about 10 minutes to set stuff up after a fresh restore.