Migrating from old iPad to new iPad without backup

[OhioDave]

I've used iPhones for some years now, but don't have iPad experience. A friend has owned an iPad for several years and has purchased a new one. He asked me to help him move everything from the old one to the new one. It turns out that he's never had iCloud enabled, and he never had the old iPad connected to iTunes. I thought the most straightforward way would be to backup the old iPad in iTunes and then do a restore to the new iPad. Unfortunately, when I connect the old iPad to iTunes it gives only two options: set up as new iPad, or restore from a previous backup. I have no option to go straight to making a backup, and I certainly don't want to set it up as a new iPad and lose what he has on there. I'd appreciate suggestions as to the best way to approach this.

Dave

 

[J. A.]

In general, the iPad works the same as the iPhone, with a few minor differences.
If you can't use iTunes to backup the iPad, activate iCloud and back it up there. When you set up the new device, you can use that backup.

Here are the instructions:
Transfer content from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a new device - Apple Support

Hope that helps.

 

[OhioDave]

In general, the iPad works the same as the iPhone, with a few minor differences.
If you can't use iTunes to backup the iPad, activate iCloud and back it up there. When you set up the new device, you can use that backup.

Here are the instructions:
Transfer content from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a new device - Apple Support

Hope that helps.

Thanks J. A. I thought maybe iCloud would be our only option, but I was hoping that maybe there was another way to do it with iTunes that I wasn't aware of. iCloud can be slow compared to iTunes. Appreciate the response.

 

[twerppoet]

You should be able to close the new iPad or restore dialog without choosing either. The X on a windows dialog box, or the red dot on a Mac. Then you can dig into the menu's and find the Transfer Purchases option. This will almost always get iTunes to recognize the iPad, after which you can do a backup. I think it's under Files > Devices.

At least that's the way it used to work. I haven't had reason to check it recently.

But the iCloud backup and restore should also work fine, and is better at recovering from minor interruptions during the app restoring phase. But it does take longer.

 

[OhioDave]

You should be able to close the new iPad or restore dialog without choosing either. The X on a windows dialog box, or the red dot on a Mac. Then you can dig into the menu's and find the Transfer Purchases option. This will almost always get iTunes to recognize the iPad, after which you can do a backup. I think it's under Files > Devices.

Duh. Wish I'd thought of that. Didn't occur to me at the time. I think I'll give this a try. Thanks!

 

[twerppoet]

Good luck.

 

[Husq250]

Just a thought-

My computer is getting too old for iTunes (or anything else for that matter) and iCloud has been less than perfect too many times as well. I decided to make up a folder system in drop box that I access via Documents (by Readdle so I have "cloud" and "local" files) to store all my important info. That way if I need to perform a "erase all content and settings" or move over to a new iPad I can do that via drop box and reload apps one by one. It been working great for me and has solves all my back up and iCloud issues. I realize this won't work for everyone especially those who are large data, photo of video users. And of course that won't back up things like game progress etc. Drop box is limited.

 

[OhioDave]

Got back to this late last week. There is no way to close out of the screen that presented the two options I outlined above. If you don't choose one of those options the only thing you can do is close iTunes. In the end we decided to connect the new iPad and choose the "Set up as new iPad" option just to see what options we had after that. Since it was brand new it could always be reset and there would be no harm done. That way we could see what would have happened with the old iPad. When we did that iTunes immediately recognized the iPad as "Mike's iPad" and performed a sync without giving a choice. We also noted that it knew that it was an iPad Air, so I thought that if we hooked up the old iPad it would see it as a different device, so that's what we did. When we hooked up the old iPad and selected "Set up as new iPad" it not only immediately did a sync, but also performed a backup. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that it also referred to it as "Mike's iPad." I wasn't sure if it had realized that it was a different device or not. In retrospect I suspect that it did, because it would see the serial numbers.

At that point we at least were relieved to know that it wasn't just going to wipe the contents of the old iPad, so having a backup we then hooked up the new iPad and chose the "Restore from a previous backup" option. We restored the backup of the old iPad to the new one, went through the necessary initial setup stuff and he was off an running.

Just my personal observation here, but I've never found iTunes to be user-friendly, and it's often very unintuitive. It just amazes me that Apple hasn't given iTunes a complete revamp. I think it could be vastly improved upon.

 

[twerppoet]

Yes, iTunes has grown over the years. It is now overly big and complicated. Apple is making changes, mostly by breaking out individual functions (like the new iBooks app on the Mac), but it's been very slow going and Windows isn't getting much love.

I suspect Apple's plan is to just keep iTunes going until they've got everything in place so that no one ever needs iTunes, for anything, then kill the beast. At that point we'll probably get some completely new and simpler program (or programs) that does only a few of the things that iTunes does.

Anyway, I'm glad you got it figured out.

As for the naming, iPads are always given a default name when new. That name always "FistName's iPad". It pulls it from your Apple ID in iTunes (I think). You can always change it on the iPad by going to Settings > General > About > Name. As you've seen, iTunes knows one iPad from another, even if they have the same name, so this doesn't matter much; other than keeping things straight for yourself.

 

[OhioDave]

You're probably right about iTunes. No reason to put a lot of money into it if they don't plan for it to be around in the long run. I'm kind of comfortable with the idea of having my full backup on my computer, so I do use it for that. iCloud is good for keeping certain things in sync and serves as an offsite backup, so that's not all bad. But I don't need to keep all of my photos in iCloud. I still have cloud backup of those with an online backup service.

Regarding the naming, it was especially problematic when either iPad showed up with the same name. That could make it difficult to differentiate between backups and lead to nasty mistakes. I do understand about giving devices unique names. Thanks!

 

[twerppoet]

No problem.

I'm not sure about Windows, but on the Mac when you hover the pointer over the backup name you get some additional information that can be used to identify the device. Or you just use the date and time (if you remember when the backup was done). That's what I've done in the past.

 

[gerlad0]

Can one migrate an iCloud backup for an iPad 2 (iOS 9.3.x) to a newer budget IPad (which I think uses iOS 10) ??
Thanks for your. Help

 

[J. A.]

Can one migrate an iCloud backup for an iPad 2 (iOS 9.3.x) to a newer budget IPad (which I think uses iOS 10) ??
Thanks for your. Help

Yes, you can use a backup with an "old" iOS version for an iDevice with a more recent software installed.