ITunes Restore to Replacement iPhone Did Not Work

Question

Hi,
My iphone died Wednesday night. It would not start anymore, even with the hard reset sequence. Last night I took it to the Apple Store and was amazed that they replaced it on the spot. No loaner. No forms to fill out. Just sign here ... and here is a squeaky new 8GB iPhone to replace mine. So far so good. first class service.
I asked about restoring my data. The guy at the genius bar said "so long as you synced recently in ITunes, all of your data will be restored". I had synced every night, so I should be fine. "Even my contacts and phone numbers", I asked? "Yes" he said. He switched my old sim card into the new iphone. I started it and called home ... it just worked.
When I arrived home, I put the iphone in the cradle and voila, iTunes launched, said it recognized that this was a different iphone and offered me a choice of registering the new one or restoring the old one. I opted for restore and the restore started.
A couple of minutes later I saw the apple logo on the iphone (restarting) and the following dialog on the screen of my PC: "Could not restore iPhone because a timeout occurred during restore." Ouch. But I noticed in iTunes that the name of the new iPhone had indeed changed to the name of my old iphone (silver swing phone). So I thought perhaps the restore had worked ... but some hand shake failed at the end?
I ejected from Itunes and took the iphone out of the cradle. Thumbed through the apps ... no data. No contacts, no notes, no email accounts and no ipod content. So I put it back in the cradle and hit "Sync" on Itunes. The ipod content then started syncing and 10 mins or so later I had 7GB of audio and video back in place. But still no contacts, email accounts or notes.
So questions:
1. Has anyone had a better experience with restoring to a replacement iphone?
2. Does anyone know if my contacts, notes and email accounts are backed up in itunes still ... and if so, how can I get them to restore?
3. Did the restore really fail? If so, should I worry about my new iPhone?
4. If ITunes does not back up my contacts, notes and email accounts ... is there another way to back them up for the future? I am feeling demotivated about adding 100 contacts back in manually if there is not some way to back them up and reload them if I have another iPhone failure.
Thanks

Answer 1

I doubt that this early on many people have encountered this function of the phone. It obviously is some sort of glitch, however your contacts and everything should still sync as long as they are on the PC. Make sure in the ipod settings that you have it set to sync with the computer. I don't know why it would have been shut off but somewhere there is obviously a problem. Don't worry though, everything should be on the pc.. it is just a matter of telling itunes to sync it to the phone.
silverswingman wrote:
Hi,
My iphone died Wednesday night. It would not start anymore, even with the hard reset sequence. Last night I took it to the Apple Store and was amazed that they replaced it on the spot. No loaner. No forms to fill out. Just sign here ... and here is a squeaky new 8GB iPhone to replace mine. So far so good. first class service.
I asked about restoring my data. The guy at the genius bar said "so long as you synced recently in ITunes, all of your data will be restored". I had synced every night, so I should be fine. "Even my contacts and phone numbers", I asked? "Yes" he said. He switched my old sim card into the new iphone. I started it and called home ... it just worked.
When I arrived home, I put the iphone in the cradle and voila, iTunes launched, said it recognized that this was a different iphone and offered me a choice of registering the new one or restoring the old one. I opted for restore and the restore started.
A couple of minutes later I saw the apple logo on the iphone (restarting) and the following dialog on the screen of my PC: "Could not restore iPhone because a timeout occurred during restore." Ouch. But I noticed in iTunes that the name of the new iPhone had indeed changed to the name of my old iphone (silver swing phone). So I thought perhaps the restore had worked ... but some hand shake failed at the end?
I ejected from Itunes and took the iphone out of the cradle. Thumbed through the apps ... no data. No contacts, no notes, no email accounts and no ipod content. So I put it back in the cradle and hit "Sync" on Itunes. The ipod content then started syncing and 10 mins or so later I had 7GB of audio and video back in place. But still no contacts, email accounts or notes.
So questions:
1. Has anyone had a better experience with restoring to a replacement iphone?
2. Does anyone know if my contacts, notes and email accounts are backed up in itunes still ... and if so, how can I get them to restore?
3. Did the restore really fail? If so, should I worry about my new iPhone?
4. If ITunes does not back up my contacts, notes and email accounts ... is there another way to back them up for the future? I am feeling demotivated about adding 100 contacts back in manually if there is not some way to back them up and reload them if I have another iPhone failure.
Thanks