I’ve posted a few times already on the first backup app for the iPhone, TimeCapsule from Databinge – and stressed how good it was to see a backup program. Up until recently though, I’d only done pretty simple testing with TimeCapsule – I had not had a real need to use it for real-life restores of data.
Last week I took the plunge and tried out the Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool – so I was in exactly the sort of scenario where I was hoping TimeCapsule would save me a good amount of time, once I had my iPhone jailbroken via this new method. So how did it do for me? Mostly very well, with a couple of places where I’d like to see some improvement.
Here’s what I backed up with TimeCapsule just before starting out on restroing my iPhone and running Pwnage Tool on it:
Installer Sources
Maps (bookmarks)
Phone call history
Notes DB (haven’t swapped all to moleskin yet)
Safari bookmarks
Webclips
These were the items that would be the biggest timesavers for me. TimeCapsule can create restore points for *lots* more items than those I chose, so your list of biggest timesavers might be very different to mine. Just as one example, I hardly use SMS at all – so I didn’t need that backed up at all – and my voicemail box was clean, so I didn’t bother with that.
Once I had ‘pwned’ the iPhone, I restored it to a fresh, jailbroken 1.1.4, and ran a sync with my Mac to grab contacts, photos, music, and some videos back. Then it was TimeCapsule’s turn to help me out and get my iPhone back to just as I like it. Here’s how that went:
- Maps (bookmarks for Home, Office, few favorite family places to go) = restored fine.
- Phone call history = restored fine
- Notes = restored fine
- Safari bookmarks = restored fine
- Webclips = resored fine, once I learned a little trick for making it work
- Installer Sources = no go. Restore point did not contain what I expected it to. My biggest wish with the Installer restore was to be able to have all my ‘Added’ sources (those that are not part of the standard Community Sources) chucked back on via a TimeCapsule restore. Turns out, that’s not one of the current choices – which really only get you back the standard sources, plus a full plist of all installed apps – which did not sound appealing to me, as I could see that being *very* messy.
I have traded emails with honcheng, the developer of TimeCapsule on these results. He was kind enough to teach me a little trick to make the Webclips restore work (more on this in just a sec), and to offer a workaround for the Installer Sources issue. He has also said he’ll look to include a restore point for 3rd party (non standard) sources in a future version of TimeCapsule. I think that is a must-add sort of feature – as that is a potentially huge timesaver.
When I first went to restore Webclips I found there was no item listed for them at all, and at first thought I might even have a wrong version of TimeCapsule installed. Turns out, the app looks for the existence of a /Webclips folder under the mobile user’s /Library folder, and if it doesn’t see one, it doesn’t show the Webclips item in its main menu. So … because I had not created any new webclips yet on the restored phone, that folder didn’t exist yet. Once I’d created the folder (with no content), TimeCapsule duly showed me the menu item and happily restored my webclips.
Overall, I was very pleased with TimeCapsule during this process – although the Installer Sources restore was a pretty big miss, and will be a big plus when it comes along, as that would’ve trimmed mucho time for me. All the other restores went very quickly and saved me a lot of time and hassle in not having to recreate all of the other items. Safari bookmarks and home page webclips in particular were great – as I do not like to sync bookmarks with the computer.
Anyone else have any TimeCapsule usage stories to share?
Tags: TimeCapsule, iPhone backup, iPhone restore points, iPhone native apps
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