What exactly does restoring your iPhone do?

[ChandlerXJ]

What exactly does restoring the iPhone do? Does it erase all of your pictures and contacts? I feel like I should just restore my phone every now and again to keep it fresh... what do you think.

[sJv]

Restore basically wipes your iPhone clean, deleting just about everything, including most of it's own software. It then downloads a disk image with it's software onto the phone. I would think, for this reason, that any hacks one did will get overwritten and lost with this restored disk image.

When you sync, most everything comes back. The one thing I noticed that I lost were pictures I took on the camera that I didn't import into iPhoto. Camera pictures don't seem to be automatically sync'ed. You have to manually import them in to iPhoto. I think I had a couple of pictures I forgot to import and they were lost.

-steve

Originally Posted by ChandlerXJ

What exactly does restoring the iPhone do? Does it erase all of your pictures and contacts? I feel like I should just restore my phone every now and again to keep it fresh... what do you think.

[bayansonger]

To begin to restore your iPhone data from the backup, connect your iPhone to the computer that you normally sync it to that contains the backup file, including any pictures, music, videos, and contacts.
It deletes everything from your iPhone and re-syncs it with all of your apps and music. Don't worry you won't lose anything and it might take a few minutes.
Read More at http://www.restore-iphone-backup.com/

[Radiating]

Originally Posted by ChandlerXJ

What exactly does restoring the iPhone do? Does it erase all of your pictures and contacts? I feel like I should just restore my phone every now and again to keep it fresh... what do you think.

That would not do anything for your phone's speed. iOS doesn't bloat as you use it unlike other opperating systems.

[SomeDudeAsking]

Originally Posted by Radiating

That would not do anything for your phone's speed. iOS doesn't bloat as you use it unlike other opperating systems.

Yes it does. Look at all the people in these forums who have to wipe their iDevices on a regular basis to fix performance issues.

[Beeplance]

It means installing the original piece of software back on your iPhone. You have to backup prior to a restore, and after your iPhone is restored in iTunes, you can install your backup so that your phone remains the same as before and you won't lose any information.

Restoring your phone helps to get rid of certain battery problems (when your battery drains fast for no reason) or any minute glitches that shouldn't be there most of the time.

[dextr3k]

I am sure original poster probably figured it out 5 years ago with his iPhone 2G.

[Radiating]

Originally Posted by SomeDudeAsking

Yes it does. Look at all the people in these forums who have to wipe their iDevices on a regular basis to fix performance issues.

This is due to bugs it won't help the average user.

That's like taking intense cancer drugs as preventative medicine.

[SomeDudeAsking]

Originally Posted by Radiating

This is due to bugs it won't help the average user.

That's like taking intense cancer drugs as preventative medicine.

iOS bloating up and causing performance issues is a bug.

[gotluck]

Originally Posted by Radiating

This is due to bugs it won't help the average user.

That's like taking intense cancer drugs as preventative medicine.

Aside from the fact that there arent negative side effects to restoring your device.

[vastoholic]

Originally Posted by SomeDudeAsking

iOS bloating up and causing performance issues is a bug.

In most cases I'd be willing to bet it's not iOS bloating, but in fact third party apps that were written with poor memory management causing the sluggishness.

[adnoh]

how does ios bloat?

[Appl3FTW]

uhm it RESTORES it...