app hell update day

typically the shittiest part of upgrading my phone is the sprint side…

…it’s always cool on the tech side.

new apple stuff always looks amazing. it’s fun. it’s sleek. and like you have a new girlfriend, you spend money on it – not just the device itself, but you buy it things. cords for the car, the desk, the bedroom – and cases. always more than one case. plus charging blocks, or lens attachments, or headsets. and so on. and so on.

but then comes the end of the month, and your bill’s all weird, and there’s all these extra charges for add-on lines, or the wife wanted the watch, or whatever. usually there’s a “honeymoon period” where life is pretty fucking sweet between when you fire up the device and when you get that first bill. those are the salad days.

this week i wondered if i’d reach the salad days.

save for the ridiculous password i put to log onto here i used the same five or six passwords for everything. sure, there might be a capital “X” here, or a “$” put in for an “s”, but overall the same shit. for years. the last couple of iPhone change-ups we’ve done have been seamless. sprint or best buy or whoever the fuck changes over the number, i carry around two phones for a couple hours (i remember nikki’s cell number and the shops, everything else is now kind of a blur) and then i get home, plug the old phone into iTunes, do an encrypted backup, and then restore the new phone from that. all is well. no big deal.

this time it was a big deal – i’d forgotten the password for the encrypted back up.

as mentioned, it HAS to be one of the “big six”, but after doing a backup, which since it wasn’t encrypted, wouldn’t save passwords for bank accounts and shit like that, and trying every fucking conceivable version of every password i was still froze out of being able to do an encrypted one.

maddening doesn’t even describe it. i think i almost lost my marriage over this. i was snapping at everybody, and i talked about just tossing all the phones in a box, mailing it all back to sprint, and after dropping it with UPS driving my car till it ran out of gas and just starting a new life there. yeah, i was at THAT level of frustrated.

that’s not normal.

the problem is i don’t remember most of my passwords. yeah, i have my five “standards”, but there’s multiple variations of any of em i coulda used depending on what requirements that app or bank or credit card required to make their shit work – and once i’m in i set em to unlock with my fingerprint, so i never type the password in again. most of those don’t give you more than three attempts before you’re really fucked, and in my flustered state i knew that wouldn’t be enough. plus, the company instagram and other shit i started doesn’t use any of MY passwords so when i leave atomic i can give the info to whoever takes over for me without compromising, say, my american express card or whatever.

whoops.

so i found a thread on apple’s own website that addressed this, and it was a recent (november 2018) article. it said all you had to do was “reset all settings”, which would erase a couple of basics (your wallpaper for example) but all data and passwords for apps and such would stay, and it would also erase your encrypted password, which you would just set up from there and be home free…

…unless your device was running on some archaic OS that predated iOS 11.

well, fuck. that would be me.

r.i.p. “vintaframe”, the awesome collage app i used to do a LOT of company posts. because of that i was still purposely riding out iOS 10.3.4 (in my defense originally this was also because one of our camera apps for the shop also didn’t work with 11, but we since stopped using it). since i knew i’d lose that app with the new phone ANYWAY, i decided to just bite bullet, update to the latest, and follow the forum thread.

that was an awesome plan…if it worked. but it didn’t. i got all the negatives (wallpaper gone, all kinds of app layout disarray), but when i went to put in the new password, it said the phone was already protected, so i’d need to put in the old password before that would work.

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkk!

in true “definition of insanity” i tried repeating all the steps, including the massive reset. still the same issue.

that’s when the ufc suggested i just backup to the cloud. i’ve always been wary of the cloud. i’ve always done backups of my shit on my own notebook – but now they pretty much had their shotgun to my nuts, data wise. it was do it their way or no way at all…so up to the cloud all my private info went.

so i grabbed the new phone which i’d already transferred service to, hit the cloud, and it was to no avail – there was no backup in place. turns out WHILE that first big backup is going you’re supposed to leave your phone the fuck alone and i ordered tires. oops. so i transferred service back to my seven plus (to sprint and apple’s credit they do make that really fucking easy) and we ran off to take os to class.

when i got back i started another cloud backup this time leaving well enough alone and…success? i kept the service on the seven plus and just watched tv.

(all of the above was on tuesday…so, the next morning…)

a lot of shit transferred, save for passwords. i had to re-input all my social media passwords (eight accounts between work and play) and all my email passwords (six between…) and all credit card and bank account passwords (some of those still aren’t recovered, including my primary checking account). but since i got all my email and social shit going, i decided to, once again, transfer service which it’s in the process of doing as i write this. i’ve been told in another year and a half when we do this again it will be a hell of a lot easier due to the cloud thing. we shall see. over the coming days i’ll get the bank shit worked out, as well as the airline thing (i realized as i type this i need that for sunday) and today when we do the boy’s phone the ufc can handle that shit.

this shit tested my marriage.

to apple’s credit, if i hadn’t forgotten that password i think i woulda been good, as all the other times we’ve done this via backups on my pc it’s been easy breezy save or my old phone-zoo ringtones (which ironically transferred without issue via the cloud.)