I was migrating from a 3gs to the 4s. Big mistake. Have lost contacts and access to music and apps.

Question

I was migrating from a 3gs to the 4s. Having never upgraded the IOS before, I thought that I should do that before handed the phone down to my daughter to replace her broken 3g. Big mistake. Even using Google sync for my contacts, following instruction from the Google webpage (ambiguous: cancel or not when error message is displayed?) the contacts did not sync to gmail. iTunes says it will sync contacts, but doesn't from the phone, only from the few that were in my old Gmail account. The iCloud set up asks for email and a new password- not specifying that you should use your old email and password for your old iTunes account or your phone will be instantly locked out of those apps and tunes stored there. The web info says you can't merge accounts or passwords, so, I bet I have to cancel the new set up and start over with the old password if it will even let me. I've spent 8 hrs reading, syncing, et c., on this! It will be a long time before I casually buy a new phone from them! I wonder how much time it will take to switch from the 3GS to the 4S? I now have a 3GS without contacts, no way to get the data from those files back, and can't get the apps to it or the 4S until Apple support helps fix the double identity problem.
Considering that I had verbal instructions from the Apple store prior to the IOS upgrade, reviewed all the details on line, I think this process is woefully lacking in clarity and transparency. The local ATT branch offered nothing except backing up to avoid loss of contacts if both phones were taken to the store, but not any help with the IOS or iTunes content. Cable internet for the 3GS backup and IOS 5 upgrade seemed to take about 2 hours. At least calender, notes, etc. were done correctly and 2500 picture and videos were not removed.

Answer 1

After the last post,I went to the local ATT for some feedback. The manager there, Stephen, was helpful and spent a long time, even after i had gotten the abbreviated list of contacts I had constructed from the 3GS to the 4S by an iTunes sync with the correct options selected. This however, would not sync notes. I took screen pix of my many stock symbols for future reference, and got them to transfer with Bump (as photos, in case I want to refresh my memory on some of the symbols added previously). I emailed myself copies of 28 notes i did not want to lose, because the iCloud back up would not initially work. After what seemed like years, I finally was able to get it working, following repeated refusal to Merge because of "not enough space available" @5GB even though everything was turned off except contacts and calendar.
My old phone is finally backed up to the cloud after I turned off location service on new phone, and a bunch of apps and photo data showed up for the first time, as icons to be turned off on the old phone in the  Manage Storage window. It said it was going to back up 8 GB of photos when the photo backup had been turned off on the prior screen. (The screws are loose, and the worm has turned on this software at Apple.)
Backup for notes, a few contacts, and calendar, over high speed wifi, took 25 minutes to complete without photos.
I have never seen anything this troublesome in the Apple OS!
You will need to set your own Apple ID and a .me email ID if you want to use the cloud. My recommendation and that of the store manager for the first time is don't back up any photos, let it erase the photo stream if it wants to. The camera roll should be ok.
Backing up to the iCloud removed all my stocks from the old phone! It wasn't supposed to. Be sure to select leave data on phone at every opportunity- even so, there they went. It did not remove contacts or calendar when backing up, though the IOS 5 upgrade had lost my years of contacts since I had not specified that they should be saved when I hit the simple sync in iTunes the first time and since Googlesync failed to connect properly for me over wifi as noted above.
All in all it appears nothing is going to clone your phone or preserve all the data through a IOS 4.x to 5 migration, though I did not do it right the first time with iTunes, and complicated matters by starting with a new ID instead of my old iTunes account and password, living in a small town, away from any Apple store, though if you can't be there at an Apple store with both phones in hand, they probably can't help much unless they walk you through each option in iTunes and you are very attentive. The store genius I saw did not do this, though I had yet to order the phone at that point.
Good Luck!
Message was edited by: richardfromel dorado