Well, I just finished setting up my new PC, and I installed iTunes.  Everything smooth so far.  Remember, the happy unicorn iTunes does everything and you’ll never have to ever worry about anything.  That’s what the Mac guy on TV says.  Well, again, he’s wrong.

I didn’t have any podcasts, or music, or movies on my phone, so syncing those was no big deal.  I did, however, have pictures and applications installed.  When telling iTunes on the new PC to sync applications and sync pictures, it gave me the warning that everything would be erased from my iPhone.  Well, that’s not good.

I made a backup of my camera roll and let it sync the pictures.  Hey, cool…it didn’t erase all my pictures.  Oh wait…the other folders that were NOT in the camera roll are gone.  Damn…I didn’t back those up.  Can I restore an earlier backup?  Probably, but it’s not really worth it.

So what about my applications?  I don’t want to have to download everything again.  And what about the data that is on the phone…I sure don’t want to lose that.

Supposedly you can select the “Transfer purchases from XXX’s iPhone” from the File menu, and it will update the library with everything on the iPhone.  The problem with that strategy is that it doesn’t work.  After Googling for a while, I tried a trick to download a new free app from the app store using iTunes on the PC.  Then tried the transfer function again.  Well, we’re getting closer.  Now there are 4 pages of my apps in iTunes…but where’s the rest?  They are not all there.

If i ever get this figured out, I’ll post my solution here.

UPDATE:

Hilarious.  All my apps that start with the letter P-Z are not included in the “Transfer purchases…” functionality.  WTF Apple?

UPDATE:

Well, opening up my iTunes library mobile applications folder (C:\Users\Michael\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Mobile Applications), I could see that the apps starting with the letter P or greater were not there, so I kept that folder open, and kept hitting the “Transfer purchases…” option, watching them slowly start to appear.  Once I verified they were all there, I was able to select the “Sync Applications” checkbox in iTunes, and check all the applications, and was finally able to get a good sync.  I have no idea what caused that, or what fixed that.  But I sure don’t want to go through that again. :(

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