I was complaining here in a thread about the way that iTunes always wants to delete all my apps, data and music when I introduce it to a new computer. Some people's experience agreed with mine, others had never seemed to have the problem.

I upgraded the hard disk in my machine machine a couple of months ago and also moved from WinXP to Win7 at the same time. I had been putting off getting iTunes syncing with my phone on the new install until now.

So today I got round to it.

The process was simplified by the fact that I am starting afresh with my music library, as I recently reripped all my music (lowish bitrate mp3 before, now flac transcoded to MP3 for the empeg and iPhone). So I was quite happy to check the "sync my music" button, see the "iTunes will delete all the music on your phone" message and click "ok".

Sure enough iTunes deleted all the existing music on my phone and synced a load of new stuff over.

Then came the apps. When I checked "sync my apps", as always I got this message:



Now I clearly don't want press "sync applications", as that will delete all the app related data on my phone, right ?

But there isn't another option in iTunes, so it is a seeming dead end at that point.

I decided to backup the phone (as solid reliable backups/restores is one thing that iTunes thankfully gets right) and see exactly what did happen when I let it delete all my apps/data. So I did it and pressed the scary button. It transferred my purchased apps over from the phone and then synced.

The end result ? Exactly the opposite to what the scary message warned about. All my apps and data are intact*, everything now syncs ok.

So, is this the least informative message box ever or am I somehow misreading this ?

Presumably those of you who haven't had problems with new iTunes setups never read this message or somehow knew it didn't mean what it said ?

Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes ?

Just need to re-add all my podcasts now and teach the new iTunes install which ones I have already listened to, *sigh*


* intact except that for no good reason my 8 pages of apps have been complete rearranged, good job the iTunes app page UI works so well, NOT

Never seen that dialog before on the OS X side when moving my library to different machines. Out of curiosity, did you authorize the machine with your iTunes account prior to that sync?

That is the same message I have always seen with all versions of iTunes whether on the PC or Mac.

Yes the account was fully authorized before hand.

But don't forget I wasn't attempting to move my library, I hadn't copied in any config files or anything like that.

My experience matches 100% with yours, Andy. I got the same scary message about the apps when working with my wife's computer and her iPhone, and I also backed up before going forward.

And I also ended up with an annoyed wife who had to rearrange all her apps on her phone. I agree, it makes no sense that it wouldn't remember where those apps were before. It makes me wonder what will happen when people cultivate a system of well organized folders and try going through this. I imagine all the folders would be blown out and the apps placed back on the home screens in random order.

Ahh, right, read part of your post and had a coworker come over, so I missed the part about starting with a new library.

The dialog is a bit weird in the way it's worded compared to what happened. I probably would have hit cancel myself. And I do wish that the whole iPhone syncing wasn't tied into iTunes. OS X had a perfectly good framework for this kind of stuff with iSync, and it works great with nearly every phone and Palm PDAs out there except the ones from Apple.

Andy, I get the corresponding message about the music library whenever I try to synch my phone to a different computer. Interestingly, I got that problem simply when I switched to a different user account on the same PC. I can't find a way to get around that box, I just want to keep what's on my iphone and switch around which computer that I'm synching it to.

Spoke too soon there. Just had my first iTunes restore failure.

Decided to give iOS 4.0 GM a go, backedup iPhone on my Mac, installed iOS 4.0, restored backup.

No lock screen image, no apps etc

Ooops.

Had to jump through some hoops to get it back onto 3.1.3 and am now restoring from a slightly earlier backup on my PC. That'll teach me

Did you install iTunes 9.2? Thats required for the GM build.

I did.

Well iTunes 9.2 is here, still has the same complete nonsensical alert message and it still throws away all your app arrangement (including iOS 4.0 folders) when you have to reset app syncing.

However it does have a big step forward. App management from within iTunes is now dramatically faster, that bit of UI used to glacially slow.

Bleh. The size of the iTunes installer is getting stupid. Its now bigger than 100MB to download.

100MB for what was just a music player. The recent 10.6.4 update for my laptop was bigger then all of 10.0, coming in at around 640MB.

What happened in the past few years to really start bloating things?

ARGH !!!

Bloody iTunes.

Went to apply iOS 4.0.1, before applying it iTunes was complaining that there were apps on the phone that hadn't be transferred.

Looked at the Applications tab and sure enough syncing had been turned off again. So I have to turn it back on and yet again iTunes bins all my folder arrangement. So now I have 80+ apps to arrange how I want them, again. FFS !

Edit: in fact it has turned of all the syncing, so all my podcasts and music have to get resync yet again

And after all that it is still saying "Some purchases have not been transferred" when I go to apply the update