My iCloud restore experience … it wasn’t planned to test the iCloud that early but well, situations like that mostly happen when you don’t expect them.

I’m not sure what went wrong in the first place but after downloading some music on the iPad and doing a sync with iTunes those new tunes refused to work. Even worse, I had some tunes just playing the next title instead. A total mess - but only on the iPad. Everything was fine on iTunes and the iPhone.

Tried to sync a few times but couldn’t get it fixed. Then I made a big mistake: Instead of just unmarking music sync in iTunes, syncing one time and then marking it again, I removed the playlists on the iPad. Very big mistake. Of course the deletions synchronised to iTunes and now my playlists had been gone. Was able to recreate them from a backupfile that wasn’t too old but still had the problem that the music was messed up on the iPad.

Therefore it was time for a restore. I do iCloud backup and my newest backup was from last night (less than 18 hours old). I had all the new purchased titles already on iTunes and the iPhone so I gave it a shot.

The restore process via iCloud is great, it definately “just works”! No cables just answering a few questions (location services, wlan, Agrrement etc.) and then you tell your device to restore from the last backup.

The settings and all the basic stuff (including the folders and the app bodys) is there immediately. Of course it takes some time to restore all the apps (about 2 hours for me) but that’s no problem. As soon as an app is fully loaded you can use it. The load process goes from the first app/folder on your home screen to the last. So if you have your most important apps in front those will be loaded first and you’re immediately ready to continue working with your device.

While the process is great in general you have to keep some things in mind:

• Only music from the iTunes store is included in the backup. So if you have digitalised CD’s or music from other sources don’t get rid of your PC. You have to sync with iTunes at the end to get them back!

• Videos in the photo app aren’t part of the photostream. Therefore they are not part of the backup either. Lost four videos that way. Not a big deal in that case but a thing to remember. Put them on dropbox or some other place before restoring. O.K., I was wrong on this! Apparently they are not put back into the self created folders but they are still part of the backup and can be found in the Standard or Imported folder. So I just had to add them back to their appropriate folders. Good news! :-)

• Same is of course valid for any data from apps that don’t support iCloud. If you want to know which apps are storing documents & data for the backup just check “General - Usage” (weird location as I rather would expect it in the iCloud section)

So beside those small hickups this was a nice way to recreate my device. And the music titles in question started to work again. Unfortunately my playlist problems still remained so I had to empty the music on my iPhone too. This time I made it in the right order … but (yes, this was a bad day yesterday!) after enabling music again my PC went down with a bluescreen about 5 minutes before the final sync was finished. Now the iPhone seems to be in a sync-loop and it looks like I have to get a restore there too.

Anyway, I would definately reccommend to use iCloud backup rather than iTunes backup. Just use common sense to ask yourself which stuff should be stored seperately … just in case ;-)