Use all space for video?

[macca80]

Hi folks,

I have an iPhone 4s & i think its great. I have a question though.

I have a lot of apps currently synced to my iPhone & they are taking up most of the space.

I want to "safely" back them up & unsync them from iPhone so i can shoot a video using all the hard drive space, transfer the vids to pc then re-sync all the apps back.

What is best way to go about this as i don't want to lose any data, particularly in games i have been playing for a while.

Thanks

 

[macca80]

Does anyone know this in this whole forum?

 

[RoofMonkey]

The scary part are the games/scores, etc...
Try syncing 1 that you won't loose sleep over if you loose your ace to the cloud, or iTunes.
Restore and see if it kept your scores / place. Best thing I can think of to try.

 

[fury]

Games that save the data locally to the phone will start over like new once you reinstall them. Most games do this, in my experience. Only a select few like Infinity Blade 2 will save to iCloud and keep in sync across uninstalling & reinstalling.

What you could do is restore the phone from a backup after you've got your videos transferred from it.

First, back up the phone manually - right-click it in the iTunes side bar, and select "Backup" from the popup menu. Note the date and time you did this. Ensure that this backup is shown when viewing the iTunes backup list (iTunes/Edit menu -> Preferences -> Devices).

Second, turn on iCloud backup in the phone (if you haven't already) so that iTunes stops backing up the phone when you sync. Whenever iTunes backs up, it overwrites the latest backup it has for the phone, so you do not want it to overwrite that backup that has the game saves.

Then, erase the apps to make space, shoot your videos, and move the videos over to your computer.

When ready, right-click the phone and hit "Restore from backup." You will see more than one backup from which to choose, similar to the Devices page of the preferences. Select the manual backup you made, and hit Restore.

You will lose anything that you did on the phone after that backup was made, like messages and new game saves, but it will reinstall your games and put their saved data back where it was when you hit the back up button.

[edited a few minutes later, it looks like iTunes does NOT save every manual backup. Not sure if it ever did. I think it only saves a separate copy of the backup when you restore]

 

[macca80]

Ok ... I will try this.
There should be a bulletproof method though.... I lost my tiny tower & sims before, months of playing gone in 1 sync. (I backed up and restored)
I wouldn't want anything like that to happen again.

 

[fury]

Agreed. Historical backups that you can selectively restore like Time Machine would be fantastic. I'd go back in time in a particular game without erasing everything else. Lost 14 hours of Galaxy On Fire play time to an accidentally overwritten game save once, and didn't want to lose everything else I had just to jump back to my last backup.

As an additional layer of backup, you can try using something like iExplorer (free) to manually grab each individual game's documents to have on hand in case all else fails. But even that isn't necessarily bulletproof, because some games don't save their data in those documents folders (and therein lies the difficulty in having an easy, bulletproof, and/or selective backup solution). I know for instance Tiny Tower also saves it into the keychain SQLite database on the phone. iExplorer can also let you grab that keychain database, but I do not know if it is possible to restore the games that do that just by replacing that file. I thought Tiny Tower saved a backup to their servers, too, as on a few occasions, I have been prompted to restore from a backup they found.