Sunday, August 12, 2012

Restarting, Restoring, and iCloud

My ipad2 decided to be wonky today, I ran my battery out and went to plug it in and it just started turning back on, and then off, and then restarting.....  After leaving it plugged in to recharge for a bit, it continued with powering down and restarting over and over so I figured it may need to be restarted.
To restart an iPad or iPod Touch you can hold the home and sleep buttons down at the same time for about 10 seconds until you see the apple logo.  This will restart your iDevice.  This often fixes frozen screens or strange behavior and has been successful many times with my iPod Touches.  But this didn't work for my iPad today, it immediately continued to restart over and over. 
So that's when I started the dreaded restore process.
Normally when an iPad is plugged into a computer with iTunes, it will recognize that a device has been plugged in.  If it doesn't (which mine would not today) then you can hold the home key down while plugging it in.  This little trick worked and it immediately told iTunes that this device was needing to be restored.
From there I had to ask it to restore and update which can be a very lengthy process.  Restore will also delete your data and set you back as if you have a new iPad.  This is why backing up your iPad is so important. When done extracting and restoring, it will appear as if it is again new out of the box.
Please note: I have never plugged my ipad into my computer thus I had no back up of my iPad settings on my iTunes.  But I did set up iCloud
And in iCloud, I had marked "on" for backup.



 Once my iPad finished restoring and I walked through the set up process I was asked if I wanted to restore from iCloud.  It then prompted me to enter my Apple ID and password and then I let it load.  It saved all my settings from about a week ago and the only thing I had to enter was the passwords on my email accounts. That was so much better and faster than having to reset up my iPad!
Notice in iCloud the very important option of "Find My iPad" - this is a must, along with backing up!  iCloud is limited to 5GB without purchasing more, so you may want to backup your larger files (like photos and videos) to Dropbox or something similar. 

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