iPhone and iTunes has me by the balls

[Scoth]

Today I realized that I hadn't backed up my 4S in a while so I opened up iTunes. When I tried backing it up it gave me an error, and I did some research and found that people solved it by deleting their old backup, so that's what I did. After that, when I tried backing up again I got an error "The iPhone 'iPhone' could not be synced because the sync session failed to start." I decided to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes to see if that would help, since I wanted to upgrade it anyways. Now when I plug in my phone, iTunes says that it can't read the contents of my phone and that I have to restore it.

Long story short, I now have no backup and am faced with wiping out the music and apps I bought since I last synced with iTunes. And I don't have iCloud, by the way.

Any help?

 

[JPM42]

Today I realized that I hadn't backed up my 4S in a while so I opened up iTunes. When I tried backing it up it gave me an error, and I did some research and found that people solved it by deleting their old backup, so that's what I did. After that, when I tried backing up again I got an error "The iPhone 'iPhone' could not be synced because the sync session failed to start." I decided to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes to see if that would help, since I wanted to upgrade it anyways. Now when I plug in my phone, iTunes says that it can't read the contents of my phone and that I have to restore it.

Long story short, I now have no backup and am faced with wiping out the music and apps I bought since I last synced with iTunes. And I don't have iCloud, by the way.

Any help?

For all your iTunes purchased content (including apps), you should be able to redownload them all by going to the purchased section, in the iTunes Store.

 

[lordofthereef]

For all your iTunes purchased content (including apps), you should be able to redownload them all by going to the purchased section, in the iTunes Store.

+1

It sounds like this is literally your only option. Get iCloud for the next go around. At least most of your setting will be saved.

 

[motoleo]

Use SharePod to save your music to your computer. And there is a way to save your apps too. Right click "iPhone" and transfer purchases to iTunes.

Simples!

 

[Zcott]

Considering you have a 4S, your best option is really to turn on iCloud.

 

[Agent-P]

Try creating a free iCloud account, back up to that. Then when you plug into iTunes on your computer, restore it. Then during the setup have everything sync back from iCloud. After that, make a backup on your computer. It's a lengthy process, but it seems like the only alternative if you don't want to lose your data and such (this is assuming you have your music/videos/camera roll on your computer to add back afterward as iCloud won't back these up).

 

[tremlock]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A406 Safari/7534.48.3)

Happened to me before. I unplugged, did a hard reset, restarted my Mac plugged back in and all was fine. It worked for me so hopefully it will work for you!

 

[matttye]

For all your iTunes purchased content (including apps), you should be able to redownload them all by going to the purchased section, in the iTunes Store.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a piss poor option? If Apple allowed us to mount the iPhone as a hard disk we could just copy/paste music, photos etc onto it. A lot safer than having to rely on iTunes sync.

I understand that you were helping the guy and this is literally his only choice, I just think it's terrible that that's all he can do!

 

[ssmed]

For all your iTunes purchased content (including apps), you should be able to redownload them all by going to the purchased section, in the iTunes Store.

This will not work for Movies or Audiobooks in the UK so I would check your country's licensing rules before committing to this solution.

 

[Stealthipad]

This si why I will ALWAYS hate iTunes and Apple's restrictions it puts on us!

This is why Android and Windows OS will do well.