iPad What data survives a restore from old to new device

[49Kat]

Well, my iPad 2 is old, and I was fortunate enough to be able to get an iPad Mini 4 with points. I wanted to transfer my data to my new iPad, and hopefully not have to redownload entire book libraries. (Yes, I realize some on this board do not have their entire libraries on their devices. I like to have it all there. I travel, I do not always have internet available, and I like to have my library at my disposal at such times.) My new mini has 128 Gb, so lots of room for my stuff. My iPad 2 did have all my ebooks on it.

So I backed up the iPad 2 to my Windows PC, having it encrypted so that everything would get backed up. Now Apple claims that all the data on your device is on this backup.

Nope.

First of all, the apps had to all be downloaded again.

I was pleased that the contents of an app I used for journaling did survive intact. To me, that and the pictures meant the most, and all the pictures and albums made it. Yes, I do have the pictures backed up to my PC, but I like having the albums organized the way I do on the Apple device.

The contents of my Bluefire library did not make it. Nor my old Sony Reader app. Most of that was duplicated to my Kobo account, but there were a few books that were not. I have a Sony reader, and the items might be there. I would guess, though, that these were not paid for items, and if I haven't noticed them in the past few years, I likely don't need them.

The Kobo library had to be downloaded in its entirety, which is super annoying on a satellite internet connection. The 'download all' option did not go smoothly. I have a generous data plan on my iphone, and I ended up using the hotspot. I have 3 days left in my billing cycle and at nearly 6 Gb in, I'm not quite half way into the plan limit.

The Kindle library appeared to be OK. The checkmarks were in the books, but I didn't scroll all the way down in the 'device' part. It turns out that a good chunk of my library did not make the transfer. Those that did had to be manually individually removed from the device and downloaded again. What a nuisance. Each book has to be dealt with on an individual basis. I guess on the positive side--I did have some books there that were freebies and whose subject matter no longer holds my interest, so this may be a good way to do some housecleaning in my Kindle library.

And I have some .mobi ebooks there that I got free from a non-Kindle source, and those books did survive the transition. (I have backups of those files on my Windows PC, I could just use dropbox to put them back in the Kindle app if I needed to.)

All iBooks and music had to be downloaded again, but Apple does say the backups do not back up that data. I took spouse's hotspot bandwidth for the music, he had used less than 100 Mb of his plan. I have less than 50 songs in my purchased library, so not bad. Re the iBooks, remember when Apple had all those freebies a while back? I would like to get them back, at least. I don't have a lot of purchased content there, I can do better price wise with other vendors most of the time.

So, this was my experience changing devices, if it helps anyone to know what data gets backed up and what doesn't. I'm not sure why the data from my ebook apps didn't get backed up. Maybe it's a copyright protection thing.

[jhowell]

App developers have control of what data is backed up for each app. Apple provides guidelines. See here.

Everything in your app’s home directory is backed up, with the exception of the application bundle itself, the caches directory, and temp directory.
...
Only documents and other data that is user-generated, or that cannot otherwise be recreated by your application, should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Documents directory and will be automatically backed up by iCloud.
Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the Caches directory include database cache files and downloadable content, such as that used by magazine, newspaper, and map applications.

[jhowell]

One more note about the Kindle for iOS app. Amazon keeps track of each registered app installation individually. Even with a restored backup you should have been forced to re-register the Kindle app with Amazon on the new device, which would have generated a new DRM key. Any Kindle books purchased from Amazon that had DRM and were downloaded on the old device would be unusable without being downloaded again keyed with DRM for the new app registration.

[49Kat]

Originally Posted by jhowell

One more note about the Kindle for iOS app. Amazon keeps track of each registered app installation individually. Even with a restored backup you should have been forced to re-register the Kindle app with Amazon on the new device, which would have generated a new DRM key. Any Kindle books purchased from Amazon that had DRM and were downloaded on the old device would be unusable without being downloaded again keyed with DRM for the new app registration.

Aha, OK that makes sense now. I think I did have to sign back into the Kindle app on my new device.

My Kobo app was a little funny. I wasn't asked to sign back in, but the downloading wouldn't work so I ended up signing out and then signing back in. Of course when you sign out, all your content is gone, but at least the Kobo app had a 'download all' option, which was nice.

I actually created an encrypted backup from the old iPad on a computer using iTunes and then restored to the new device from there, rather than backing up and restoring from iCloud because even with a good internet connection in the past, I didn't have great luck using iCloud to restore a device. I got a lot of blank spaces where pictures should have been, it was an absolute mess.

[Clif_Hamel]

If doing a restore from a backup then everything, it should be seamless.