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Switching From Old IPhone To New 3G IPhone

By Dave Taylor
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-07-31

I just upgraded from a first generation Apple iPhone to a shiny new 16GB white iPhone and am excited to switch over completely. All my data, phone book, etc are on the old system, though, and I am perpetually anxious about first sync as I'm afraid that the empty phone address book will overwrite my huge address book data already on the computer? How do you clone the old iPhone and the new?

Dave's Answer:

I also just got a new Apple iPhone, though I oped for the black 16GB unit rather than the white one, and I was also curious how things would go. I expected that while I was at the Apple Store the tech helping me would plug in the old phone, run some super mysterious Apple-only utility, suck the brains out of my old phone (well, not literally!), then plug in the new phone, push the "clone" button and *poof* I'd have my new phone completely bit-for-bit identical to my old phone.

Alas, that's not exactly how it happened. In fact, I walked out of the Apple Store with a new phone that made and received calls, but that was it. Nothing else worked, no apps were downloaded, none of the music and video I'd bought at the iTunes Store were on, zippo.

Scary since I was on a trip and about 900 miles from my office!

Fortunately, I sync my iPhone on my laptop and so I simply plugged in the new phone and figured worst case, at least I could copy across the address book.

Here's what promptly happened:



Looks good, cheery, reassuring. Right? No voice of The Steve saying "hey, welcome to iPhone!" but I can probably live without that anyway. :-)

I clicked on the "Continue" button and got here:



Ahhh... that's what I wanted. A few "yes, I agree to these goofy legal terms that I'm never going to read anyway" windows and finally, it was rockin, with a "restore" progress window.

This process took rather a while and when it was done, I still didn't have everything I wanted. In fact, it took a couple of "sync" events before all the apps were transferred onto the new iPhone (Apple, are you listening?) but finally it was done, and not only did I have my address book, but recent calls, email configuration, Web bookmarks, applications, and everything else.

Except there were two notable exceptions that surprised me.

The first was that not a single password was copied across. For every service I use, notably including voicemail itself, I had to re-enter passwords, which initially seemed like a pain but upon thinking about it, I like the additional verification step.

The other missing piece? A big one: my entire iTunes library. Probably for reasons of digital rights management (DRM), nothing from my music library (which, ironically, is why I got the bigger iPhone in the first place: my original was only a 4GB device) was copied onto the new phone. The good news, I suppose, is that I can now pick and choose just what I want installed to fill up all the cavernous space on the new device.

Generally, though, I was pleased and impressed how easily I was able to clone all the essential data from my old Apple iPhone onto my new one. I hope this helps you out too!

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About the Author:
Dave Taylor is known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

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