[Massie]

I wish I had seen this yesterday! Never again will I have to organize my homescreen after a restore...turns out there's an easy way to get iTunes to do it for you!

Restore Your iPhone Without Losing Your Homescreen Organization - Lifehacker

[BLiNK]

i love you

[Ham Solo]

Very cool. I'll have to remember that.

[BreakingKayfabe]

lol I thought everyone knew about that. It even has most of your app data
backed up for restore too.

[Massie]

I think we all knew about apps and app data, but usually a restore means you have to rearrange your apps by hand. No more!

[sting7k]

Maybe I'm missing something but this just looks like you are restoring from a back up as normal. In that case it has always preserved your home screen layout.

[Ipheuria]

Maybe I'm missing something but this just looks like you are restoring from a back up as normal. In that case it has always preserved your home screen layout.

not the times I've done it and believe me I've done it ALOT. I use Pwnage Tool so my firmware is always reloaded from scratch then I restore my backup. Each time I've had to recreate the folders myself. The lucky thing is that I only ever have a handful of apps but this will save me that frustration.

[Massie]

There seems to be some confusion about this—maybe it has to do with iTunes settings? At any rate, when I restore (as when loading a new firmware), iTunes does NOT initially put third-party apps back on my iPhone. (Maybe because I don't have it set to sync new apps or sync automatically?) Instead, a restore only gives me the default Apple apps, like the linked article says—to get the rest I have to sync once AFTER I restore. That syncs my apps but not the old layout—that is the situation the article addresses.