When Backup and Restore Literally Saves Your Sanity - an essay by Goosie Mama

All of my photos of my G and my life in general are taken on my iPhone. I think I own a digital camera, but I haven't touched it in years, and frankly, I'm not sure I could find it if you asked me to!

Now, for those techies out there, you'll know that the new iPhone comes with a 29MP camera. This is pretty impressive, especially considering the first digital camera my family owned was a 25 lb. Kodak number with a whopping 1.2MP that cost more than a monthly mortgage payment.

Naturally, since my AT&T contract was up for renewal in September, the same month (conveniently) that the iPhone 5 came out, I ordered my new phone 4 weeks ago and happily (and impatiently) awaited its arrival.

This Tuesday (gahhhh, 21 business days later), my gorgeous new white iPhone5 arrived at my apartment; and after some chasing down and choice words with the UPS man, I couldn't wait to start using it.

To ensure everything was easy, peasy during the transfer from one device to the other, I decided I should update my old iPhone4 to the new iOS6 operating system prior to transferring my number. No problem, right?

Wrong. iOS6 caused my iPhone 4 to crash and I was getting an error that the phone was unable to restore. I spent almost 3 hours on Tuesday night trying to fix this with no luck and I had no phone service to boot. That being said, I wasn't in full panic mode yet, because I could clearly see that the last iCloud back-up and restore had occurred on Oct. 22nd. All was (still) good.

So in order to continue troubleshooting, I got to work super early on Wednesday morning with my Mac, iPhone4 and iPhone5 in tow (and my Kindle for good measure - thank goodness I didn't get mugged!). After another 3 hours of troubleshooting (with zero help from Apple, might I add, uninstalling every antivirus program I have), I finally successfully restored my phone. The bad news? The backed-up version of my phone from October 22nd was nowhere to be found. Thus, none of my pictures transferred over.

Well, even I had to admit that a working device is better than a dead one, so, I grudgingly decided that I would just have to transfer over to my iPhone5 and be really sad that I'd lost a year and half of G pictures (things were getting really emotional at my desk).

I started the process of moving to the iPhone5 and - GASP - a back-up and restore message asked me if I wanted to restore from 9am 10/24 or from 8pm 10/22 - OCTOBER 22nd?! That's the one I needed!!

I pressed the button and voila! Everything, down to the exact way I had my apps, music, pictures, screensavers, emails and alarms was back in action on my new phone!!

I can safely say back-up and restore saved my sanity and my photo library :)

Proof that my phone has all of its' photos back - here's G passed out 2 years ago!