Keeping a spare iPhone?

[mojolicious]

I found an iPhone 5c contract for my elder daughter that was too good to resist and now, for the first time, we're in a position where we have an iPhone that no-one wants: a beaten-up iPhone 4 running iOS7.x

All iPhones regularly in use at casa mojo are now running iOS8.

How do I go about retaining the iP4 for emergency use, or (more likely) for use by elder daughter when she goes to places you'd rather not take a decent phone?

My worry is how I manage both an iOS7 and an iOS8 device with a single Apple ID and iCloud account. Is it simply a case of setting up an additional iTunes library to store iOS7-specific apps, and make sure that iCloud is turned off for this iP4 account?

 

[KeepCalmPeople]

I don't think there is a need to set up anything in iTunes necessarily. Reset the iPhone 4 to factory settings on iOS 7, then setup as a new phone using your daughter's Apple ID. You/she can download apps etc. from the cloud, and the iPhone 4 will get iOS-compliant apps. She will then have two phones associated with her Apple ID - no conflict (only one can be used for Find My Friends of course).

If there are apps that you are concerned will no longer work with iOS 7 when updated, then yes, perhaps you will need to back them up to iTunes...

Another thought - the iPhone 4 uses a micro SIM. The iPhone 5 onwards use nano SIMs. You won't be able to swap your daughter's SIM from her 5c to the 4 unless you have some kind of nano SIM tray that turns it into a micro SIM.

 

[mojolicious]

Thanks for the quick response, KCP. Unfortunately it wasn't quite quick enough: the 5c arrived ten minutes after I'd posted and I decided to dive right in.

Naturally I completely failed to document the process, but it went something like this...

1) perform backup to Mac of iP4

2) created new iTunes library for iP5c

3) updated iP5c from iOS7.1.1 to iOS8.0 (was no obvious option to 7.1.2 it, but that wasn't my intention anyway)

4) restored iP5c from iTunes backup of iP4

5) discovered that everything had come across with exception of music and apps – in hindsight it was picking up the settings, photos and app data from daughter's mobilesync folder, but wasn't linking to the content in the iTunes Media folder

6) drag-copied apps from iP4 iTunes folder to iP5c iTunes folder then dropped them into iTunes, which worked (left her to sort out her own music)

At some random point quite late in the day I got an 'already synced with another iTunes library' warning, but this didn't seem to have any effect on anything.

I'm sure it's not the most elegant solution, but it worked

In retrospect I think the only thing I really needed to do was to ensure that I'd retained a copy of the OS7-friendly .ipa files somewhere, and set up the iP4 as a new and data-less phone as and when required.

Am now wrestling with iCloud Backup. I'll wait until our Macs are OS X 10.10 and have a proper look at iCloud Drive, but at present iCloud appears to be the least documented feature in the world and is refusing to bend to my will. Or at least I think it's refusing to bend to my will, because it's basically impossible to tell...