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External hard drive just died, can I restore from icloud?

Bugeyeblue

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Feb 21, 2011
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I backed up to iCloud last night, and this morning I synced to itunes. When I synced, I tried to sync my ringtones from a while back. It forced me to delete all my music from my phone. No problem, right? Just add the music back in from my hard drive. Nope. Hard drive is dead. Is it best to restore from itunes or from icloud?
 

Alli

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You can either sync to iCloud or iTunes. You can't sync to iCloud one day and iTunes the next.

Chances are you will need to restore from your iCloud sync since your iTunes sync became brand new.
 

cardfan

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Here's your chance to see if icloud works for you. If you can't restore from it, what good is backing up to it?
 

Bugeyeblue

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I don't know how to restore from it. Plus, it says I'm only using 3.8 out of 5 gb's of storage. How is that possible? I had like 8 gb's of music on my phone.
 

Libuff

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You can either sync to iCloud or iTunes. You can't sync to iCloud one day and iTunes the next.

not entirely true... you CAN force backup via iTunes while you do a cloud backup:

when you plug your phone to sync, right click on the phone that shows in the left bar of iTunes, and BACKUP.

i would recommend backing up on both services, as i've had some failures while testing restores during beta.
 

Bugeyeblue

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I ended up buying a new hard drive and was able to get the information off the old one. The problem for me, using icloud, is that it doesn't back up music that wasn't purchased from itunes. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn't back up pictures. Just a 30 day window of pictures. These two issues, as long as I'm understanding them correctly, make icloud useless for me.
 

wfs2011

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iCloud does multiple things. Photo streaming is short-term but you can also store documents permanently. As for music I believe they have a service that will convert all your non-itunes music to high quality iTunes songs and then they can be accessed via iCloud too.
 

Bugeyeblue

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iCloud does multiple things. Photo streaming is short-term but you can also store documents permanently. As for music I believe they have a service that will convert all your non-itunes music to high quality iTunes songs and then they can be accessed via iCloud too.

Thanks for the info. I didn't know they had the itunes match deal that stores your non-itunes purchased music to icloud. So for me, it's $25/yr to use icloud the way I want, plus it doesn't permanently store pictures. iTunes is free. If icloud stored all my music, all my pictures, all my settings, messages, emails, contacts - for free- I'd use it. But for me, it just doesn't make sense to pay for it.
 

BreakingKayfabe

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The only pictures it permanently stores are your camera roll pictures which are inside of a backup. You can create an iCloud backup for free.
 

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