Let the games begin!

Normal average folks actually. They shouldn't have to be computer professionals to use computers.

Sure, but then I'm a professional.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

My usual advice to clients and friends is a USB hard drive. Windows now has excellent backup, so software isn't an issue. I offer to make it automatic, because they otherwise won't do it. Cloud computing is another good solution for many.

John Navas wrote on [Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:15:54 -0700]:

True, but they should also know some basics before they start blaming other people for their problems. Anyone I know who has lost data due to not backing up now either thinks about backing up or backs up

Using both is also a good idea, ask Francis Ford Coppola.

Although Coppola has saved copies of the Tetro script elsewhere, on Friday he issued a plea for the return of a small computer backup device.

He said, "They stole our computers; they got all our data, many years of work. If I could get the backup back, it would save me years--all the photographs of my family, all my writing."

Not as often as I should, probably- I backup important data to an external USB drive every few weeks. I do have an account with Mozy.com, that gives me automatic backups for $5/month to the cloud, but in reality, that's an emergency solution, since the several hundred GBs backed up would take weeks to redownload from them. (Though they do offer to mail you all of your files on DVDs or a USB hard drive at additional cost, if necessary.)

Mozy is my "catastrophic failure" solution to fill in the gaps if my drive crashes between backups, and also an offsite backup if fire or some other horror destroys my house, taking the computer and the USB backup hard drive with it. 90% of the

True, but USB drives are cheap easy solutions. Network drives are nice, but relatively pricey.

Ironically, of course, despite having regular current backups, I've never actually lost a byte of data to hard drive failure. Perhaps I upgrade too often, copying my data to a larger drive or new PC long before the old one has a chance to fail. In any case, I still wouldn't go without a solid backup or three!

Yes, it is.

iPhones actually don't back up everything. Most things are backed up by default though.

Applications can flag some content to avoid it being backed up. Which makes sense for large/dynamic/frequently changing content that can be re-retrieved from the internet. Google Reader clients, Instapaper, Evernote, browser caches, etc have no need to have iTunes preserve anything since the data is available from the net.

Another example is media, iTunes doesn't backup media at all, so as a rule if you wipe your device you lose all the media on the device (although iTunes will restore what it placed on the device, but if you load music manually rather than synchronizing your entire library, you get to restore what you want manually)

nearly everything.

true. cached and temporary data is not backed up unless the app puts it in the documents folder. that's not anything that needs to be backed up since it can easily be duplicated, or it may no longer be valid, such as with a browser cache, and it will need to be re-downloaded even if it was restored.

the media is already backed up. what's on the iphone is a copy.

true. that's what manual sync means :)

Aren't you the one that linked to the Anandtech article earlier in the thread?

Anand seemed to show the "algorithm" of the signal meter quite clearly: the bars are linked to the RSSI (like on most phones) and switched at -

91,-101, -103, -107, and -113 dbm.

That's a pretty lousy meter, analagous to a car with a 15 gallon tank that shows "F" for the first 14 gallons, then reads 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, and "E" all over the last gallon. (Having said that, on most cars I've owned, the first "half" tank is much larger than the last "half!")

As I mentioned before, my HTC-built Sony has an awful meter as well- Apple certainly doesn't have an exclusive there. Playing in and around a dead spot yesterday, I found my Sony changes bars at -90, -95, -100, -

103, and -106.

FWIW, the most signal I could lose by touching/holding/squeezing/fondling the Sony was -11. However, given the weird curve of the meter, that could theoretically cause a drop from five bars to two, if I dropped from

-89 to -100. Look for my damning series of YouTube videos coming soon! ;)

Now we can argue "intent" all day, but we'd all just be guessing. Arguing the meter "algorithms" on both phones are primarily designed to show "full strength" as much as possible, and, as such, are all but useless to the end-user as indication of relative signal strength, would certainly be a valid one, though.

The thing I find more interesting from Anandtech (in a conspiratorial way) is the 10-second update speed (or lack thereof) for the meter. My HTCs update every 3-seconds (despite the included Field Test app having a resolution of 1-second.)

So not only is the iPhone meter 'rigged' to show "great" signal almost always, it's also rigged to hide signal drops for roughly as long as it takes you to pick up, dial the phone, and shut off the display with the proximity sensor! ;)

Conspiracy theories aside, by all reports, the iPhone 4 seems to work in practice as well as other smartphones, so this issue alone wouldn't prevent me from buying one. If the crummy cellular radio in the iPhone

2G didn't stop it from selling like hotcakes, the crummy antenna in this one won't either.

And, frankly, the whole "Awww, shucks, we've just been programming the iPhone meters wrong all along..." press release from Apple served no purpose other than to make us wonder if they're merely incompetent, or lying through their collective teeth. I'm not sure which one is preferable! ;)

[a.c.verizon xposting removed]

Where's the backup option for that? That one has bit me in the rump every upgrade, since iTunes refuses to "remember" what has been manually synced, and Overdrive library audiobooks won't load on an iPod/iPhone unless you switch to manual mode.

guessing never stopped anyone :)

the bars don't really mean much. either the call drops or it doesn't.

that was one of the more stupid things they've said.

Oh, also except Contacts, Calendars and Mail if you use server based storage mechanisms. IMAP and Exchange/ActiveSync are examples, if you wipe your device and restore the configuration is there but your data is downloaded from the server not from iTunes.

This brings us neatly back to this threads' discussion, the only difference between and iPhone and the Sidekick here is that the Sidekick wiped lost contacts/calendar data after a reboot, with the iPhone you have to kick it a bit harder to lose your local data, but either way it's not backed up locally.

(this isn't a bad thing either, device-side backups are the wrong place to do backups in a cloud architecture)

It might be. I might have loaded the music from another computer entirely and what's on the iPhone might not be a copy.

Manually choosing what to load means "don't backup"? That's an odd translation.

that's backing up and restoring to a server. nothing is lost unless that server goes away.

quite a bit harder.

it's officially called 'manually manage music and videos.'

if you are manually managing it, itunes assumes you're taking the necessary precautions. it's not the default setting either, so someone who enables it is assumed to know what they're doing.

the music is still on the computer, the only thing that's lost is the list of what's copied to the iphone. you'd need to recreate the selection of songs.

How exactly is that "assumed?" Particularly in Apple's "we don't need no steenking dialog boxes" mentality, there's no warning about the consequences.

And, apparently, iTunes backing up a list of those songs to recreate them on a restored iPhone is too much of a bother...

What about songs bought on the phone?

Ironically, if you've set iTunes to manually manage music, it will back the songs up on the computer, then won't restore them back to the phone after the upgrade!

I would check again...

There is more than one on an iphone 4?

Yes, you can select a lower-reading scale by simply touching the exposed antenna... ;)

"Todd Allcock" wrote in news:j4oZn.16571 $ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe21.iad:

That's the Apple exclusive "RF Attenuator". With Apple iPhone 4, you can actually climb the tower and, if you hold the phone in your left hand as normal, it will not overload the iPhone 4's receiver, even if you place it right in front of the panel's main lobe.

Preventing transceiver overload is very important to many users.....Like cellular tower crew, cellular technicians, Greenpeace activists who may climb the towers to add colorful anti-radiation signage, etc.

There are many uses for iPhone 4 no other smartphones can fill.

Soon, iPhone 4 will have an app to use it for a cellular wattmeter. You wrap your hand around the antenna slot and it can read up to 500 watts without going into overload. For smaller power levels, you simply hold it by the top to measure in the milliwatt range.....about as sensitive as this phone gets.

Probably several, depending on the radio being used (3G, GSM, Wifi)

there is more than one algorithm for calculating bars. none of them are any more correct than any other. that's why two phones (on the same carrier) next to each other might show a different number of bars.

what matters is whether calls drop, which based on reports (from the same people who say the bars drop) say is not happening. many are saying the iphone 4 holds calls better than other phones.

Not too much of a bother, just unprofitable: let the iOwners buy them again on a restored phone if they really want them -- *that's* the profitable approach :-) .

Cheers, -- tlvp