Have you experienced factory restore on your iPad?

[carbonel]

Hi,

I'm a seasoned computer user who regularly restores his machine to factory default settings. Yes, I realize that this might not be necessary if I use xsysinfo (great program), but I'm still seriously considering a factory reset after one year of intensive iPad use.

I would be grateful if others could share their answers to the following questions:

1. When you did a Factory Reset, did you realize that you'd forgotten to back up some crucial data? If so, what had you forgotten to back up?

2. When iTunes backs up an iPad on a local computer, does it store all of the data files in their original formats? For example, imagine that I have a few PDFs in Good Reader folders, a few DRM-free MP3 songs, and some public domain epubs from Project Gutenberg. Would it be possible to track these files down by mining the folders of my backup?

3. When you did a Factory Rest, was your iPad noticeably faster and/or less crash prone? Was it worth the hassle?

Thanks!
Aaron

 

[GapsterLeFayt]

Some good questions - I'd be interested in the answers too...

 

[Gabriel1]

I've never had a problem, I did it once with my iPad 1 and made sure that I synced just before I restored.

If you are concerned about losing anything vital you could copy those files to an app like Dropbox first so if for some reason the files don't reappear you can copy back from Dropbox.

The Archangel

 

[Good karma]

I did hard reset/ restore with both m iPhone and iPad and never had any problem, no songs or files were lost, infancy with the phone it became better with the hard reset, like opening maps and emails

 

[Kaykaykay]

I've done factory resets five or six times on iPad, iPhone and touch. No noticeable difference in speed. I've not done one since iOS 5, so I can't speak to whether devices would be less crash prone. I didn't have noticeable crashes under earlier firmware.

I didn't lose any content each time I reset, because I backed up first. If anything failed, all my music was originally bought in CD form, and I have backups outside of iTunes, so that didn't worry me. All my books are retrievable via cloud on Amazon, B&N and Kobo, so I didn't sweat that either. All my docs and photos are backed up on laptop, and I use POP3 email so my main email storage is on laptop, too.