One of the nice things about Apple products is that Apple usually makes it easy to upgrade. If you buy a new Mac, you can just connect a Firewire cord and use the Migration Assistant to move everything over to the new computer. Or if you have a Time Machine backup, the Migration Assistant lets you restore from that backup. (On a PC, my experience is that when you get a new computer, it is better to just reinstall everything from scratch.) Apple has also made the upgrade process very easy when you get a new iPhone. Just backup your old iPhone to your computer, plug in the new one, and tell iTunes that you want to restore from the backup that you just created.
For example, after I upgraded from an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4, my wife took over my 3GS. We simply backed up her iPhone 3, plugged in the iPhone 3GS, right-clicked on the device in iTunes and said that we wanted to restore from her backup, and then waited for everything to move over. It took a while (over an hour) but was easy and the computer did all the work.
As I noted earlier this week, I was recently given a brand new iPhone 4 from Apple because my prior model was having problems with the SIM card. For the most part, transferring my data to the new iPhone was easy. I backed up my iPhone 4, brought it to the Apple Store and returned home with the replacement model, and then told iTunes to copy everything from my backup to the new model. Again, I had to wait, but the computer did all the hard work.
But there was one very annoying difference between these two restorations from backup. My wife's data moved from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3GS flawlessly, including all of the apps being placed in the same place she had the app on her old model. My experience was quite different. All of the time I had spent putting apps on certain screens and in specific folders on my prior iPhone 4 was wasted on the new model. A few apps went where they belonged, but then rest of the apps were simply restored to the new iPhone in alphabetical order. (And no, alphabetical was NOT the order I had previously used to carefully arrange my apps!) Indeed, iTunes didn't even restore all of my apps — the 11th page of the Home Screen ended with apps starting with the letter R. The other apps (such as Twitterific) were still moved to the new iPhone, but because they were past the 11th screen I couldn't see them and instead could only launch the apps by using the Search iPhone function.
I believe that the difference between the restore on my iPhone and my wife's iPhone was the number of apps. The iPhone can normally display 144 apps on its 11 screens (16 per screen) plus the four apps at the bottom of each screen, for a total of 148 apps. My wife only has a few dozen apps on her iPhone, but I have a lot more than that. (I just counted and I currently have 240 apps on my iPhone. Yes, I know, I have an app addiction.) Thanks to iOS 4 and the folder feature, I can easily display all of those 240 apps on only 7 screens with plenty of room for for more apps, but it seems that iTunes has a problem with app placement when you restore from a backup and have more than 148 apps and a lot of app folders.
Because of this problem with restoring an iPhone when you have over 148 apps, it has taken me probably an hour or so of time over the last few days to move all of my apps back where they belong and to recreate all of my folders. The one advantage is that my iPhone is now even better organized that it was before, but how I wish I had thought to take screen shots of each of my home screens before I moved over to the new iPhone. That would made it so much faster to put everything back where it belongs.
If you have a lot of apps and use folders to organize them, I hope that you can learn from my experience if you ever need to restore an iPhone from a backup, such as when you upgrade to a new model. Take pictures or otherwise take note of where everything is before you upgrade so that you are prepared to restore order to the location of your apps after the upgrade.
UPDATE: Before I wrote this post, I read reports from a number of people on the Internet associating this problem with a large number of apps. But several people have posted comments to this post saying that they have had problems with app placement after a restore from backup even when they had only have a few dozen apps. Hmmm. The mystery continues, but the lesson is clear — when you backup your iPhone with the knowledge that you will soon do a restore from that backup, do yourself a favor and take note of where your apps are located. An easy way to do that is to just take a screen shot of each of your home screens (by pressing the button at the top of your iPhone and the home button at the same time).
