I Don't Trust iTunes

If ever there was an achilles heel to the iPhone, it is the utter dependency on iTunes. My quibbles with synchronization, which I was dismissing as unfamiliarity with the process, have turned out to be well-founded fears. Tonight, during synchronization, iTunes silently deleted all the contacts from my iPhone. Fortunately it was not able to finish the job by deleting them from my computer. I'm in the process right now of "restoring" the iPhone to its original settings, aka deleting everything and (I guess) re-installing its native software. I hope it works...

Gulp! In the middle of writing that sentence I saw the phone re-initialize with the dreaded "Activation" screen. Fortunately it hooked up with AT&T and everything is, uh, good now.

Except I permanantly lost the following things in my iPhone:

• Dreaded WiFi password (long, hexadecimal)
• A dozen nice photos
• All my bookmarks, custom to the iPhone and NOT ones I have any interest in syncing with the PC  Actually these were restored OK
• Dreaded configuration stuff on 2 email accounts  Only the passwords were lost
•  The photos from any contacts are gone (fortunately I had only a few)
• Contact favorites
• YouTube bookmarks
• Visual VoiceMail password
• LOSS OF TRUST

The real danger is that I could have blissfully gone off to work tomorrow (on on a week's trip!) with no contacts in my phone.

Update on Fri, July 13, 2007 at 06:18AM by Charles Gordon

I was originally going to wrap this post up last night. But after several hours, and installation of iTunes 7.3.1, I am still unable to import my contacts. I have tried just about everything. iTunes is behaving like a unsuccessful beta release, and if the iPhone is "five years ahead" of everything else I would put iTunes back in the mid-90's.

Update on Fri, July 13, 2007 at 05:33PM by Charles Gordon

As it turns out, a reader who was trying to get her Windows Address Book synced using the hack I posted last week was having some interesting issues that revealed the source of the contacts syncing and deletion issues. Some of the fault lies with WAB getting "attached" to Outlook instead of its own .wab files. Since iTunes can only read .wab files, if it can't find them it will assume that you have NO contacts to sync. And instead of leaving your poor iPhone contacts alone, it simply wipes them out without so much of a warning.

Although I should probably fault the rusty old Windows Address Book, my distrust of iTunes continues, because it violates a sacred pact between computers and people--that nothing should be deleted without asking the user first!

If you want the details on the resolution, they are here (at the bottom).

Comments

[Forrest Grant]

I actually had the same problem. It deleted all of my contacts as well. Im almost certain it fell off track trying to sync my calendars, some of which are online calendars. My computer was not online at the time so those online calendars crashed sync, but not before attempting to sync contacts that it did not have access to because of the crash. Resulting in a loss of contacts. Since then I have not synced anything internet dependent, and it has been smooth sailing. My suggestion would be to do the same.

Also, I dont think you can really blame the phone or iTunes for the loss of your other information as you restored the phone to factory settings. You could have simply asked iTunes to refresh the contacts from your address book. Problems solved, all original settings (passwords bookmarks and photos) intact.

[Charles Gordon]

Unfortunately I did try, for over hour, to re-import my contacts. Finally I came to the conclusion that the phone software should be re-built...which I understood would remove everything.

What is strange is that it refuses to sync up contacts even now.

[Frank.]

I also had a similar problem. My question however is about sync time, do you think it is normal for a 4G music sync to take over 1 hour with the iPhone? It was much faster on my iPod.

[Charles Gordon]

Frank, although I haven't mentioned it here on the blog I've noticed some strange behavior when docked to Windows. It's definitely not the full-speed USB 2.0 I get on my digital cameras; although it isn't the dog-slow USB 1.1 either. Mine took about 30 minutes to do about a 6GB music upload last night.

For strange behavior, it seems like the docking dies after about 10 minutes, even while syncing, and sometimes iTunes "bleeps" it back to life and other times it has to be re-docked. Also, I get the annoying Windows "Camera Connected" message with each dock or re-dock operation.

[Jacques (Brazil)]

Guys, I have the same problem almost every week: Simply by no "obvious" reason all contacts disappear. How to avoid the contacts from disappearing in first place? Has anyone found out how avoiding this? Detected some bug? Maybe a no native application is generating this loss? Thank you, kind regards.