Help me understand what went wrong?

[kingston73]

First of all, not sure what section this should go in so mods, feel free to move this. I of course decided to try the new jailbreak yesterday but encountered a few problems.

Before doing anything I backed up to both the cloud and my computer!

After jail breaking I decided I wanted to restore it back to pre-break so I restored from iTunes with the intention of restoring my backup, but once the initial restore was finished the only backup available was from April! Where did my backup from an hour ago disappear to? What did I do wrong?

I'd like to try jailbreaking again but not if it means I have to go back to April.

 

[JT2002TJ]

First of all, not sure what section this should go in so mods, feel free to move this. I of course decided to try the new jailbreak yesterday but encountered a few problems.

Before doing anything I backed up to both the cloud and my computer!

After jail breaking I decided I wanted to restore it back to pre-break so I restored from iTunes with the intention of restoring my backup, but once the initial restore was finished the only backup available was from April! Where did my backup from an hour ago disappear to? What did I do wrong?

I'd like to try jailbreaking again but not if it means I have to go back to April.

When you backed up your device, did you copy the backup file from your itunes directory to another location? If not, you risk loosing a good copy. When I did jb, I would run a full backup, copy that backup to a second location, then if needed put it back before restoring.

 

[kingston73]

So I should backup my backup? Where did the iCloud backups go?

 

[JT2002TJ]

So I should backup my backup? Where did the iCloud backups go?

If you are going to jb, I wouldn't rely on icloud backups anymore... Do a local itunes backup before you jb, and make a duplicate of that backup in another location (just in case). Then you can go back prior to jb'ing.

 

[kingston73]

OK, thanks for the advice.

 

[wacky4alanis]

iTunes will often decide to replace the backup you actually wanted with the current state of the phone that you are trying to get away from (e.g. the jailbroken phone, or even worse - an empty phone). As previously stated, the best way to ensure you don't get a big surprise is to take the important backup you know you want to keep and copy it to another location outside of iTunes' control. When you are ready to restore, just copy it back into the iTunes backup directory.

iTunes tries to save space and time by only keeping 1 backup directory (or a very small number). It would be much more foolproof if they kept ALL backups, but that would take a ton of disk space, and would drastically slow down each backup (no more incremental).

Of course none of this explains what happened to your backup. If the backup in iTunes is from last April, then it sounds like the latest one didn't happen at all.

 

[Jayson A]

After you make a backup, open iTunes Preferences and click on Devices. Then, right-click on your backup and select "Archive". Now that backup will not get overwritten.

This is a better solution than finding the backup in the Finder and then copying it to another location.

This is the official Apple way of keeping a particular backup.