When people say to restore from new how do they do it?

[bobright]

I've got a family member with a slow iPhone 5 they never restored from new since they got it. They basically just upgrade the firmware over the air all the time. Their phone has been a little sluggish, I was thinking maybe it'd help to restore from new. The question I have is when restoring from new are we supposed to manually re-enter everything like contacts and how about bookmarks would we lose all those?

 

[APlotdevice]

Restoring from new means NOT selecting the iTunes/iCloud backup after restoring. Any data stored directly on the phone will be lost. Now it depends on how the phone has been set up, but usually bookmarks and contacts are kept synced with the person's iCloud account. To make sure this is the case, go into settings > iCloud and check and see that Contacts and Safari are turned on. You can also turn on other things to keep them synced as well. Data that has been synced to iCloud... with the exception of what is stored in the phone's backup file... will automatically by put back on the phone after restoring as new.

Other apps will sometimes have the ability to backup and/or sync their data with iCloud or another online service such as dropbox, or alternatively may be able to download their data to a computer through iTunes.

 

[KALLT]

On my own phone, I’ve been using the same data set since the iPhone 3G and have not experienced any difference in performance. Compared to other iPhones in various states, I have not encountered noticeable differences, ever. System updates take care of volatile stuff like caches and other temp files that may impact the performance of the device. What you could try is a forced restart to shut down the device completely, without resuming previous activity (that may be working incorrectly). Other than that, a certain sluggishness is expected with older devices and newer, more demanding software.