I just can’t help myself. The first thing I do with a new toy is brick the darn thing. I have to unlock it, I have to remove certain sandbox restrictions, I have to basically break it. Why can’t I leave it alone? Because I’m just plain stupid. That being said, I like to think that no matter how deep a hole I dig myself into, I can pull myself out. So when I brick the phone of course I jump into issues and the next thing I know, I’ve got an empty iTunes library and a freshly reimaged phone sitting in front of me, completely empty. Regrettably an empty iTunes library also means no iPhone Apps.
So to restore… The first thing to do is pull your ~/Music folder from backup. This will grab your music and your iPhone Apps. To restore your settings, open your iTunes Preferences, click on the phone in question under DEVICES and then disable Automatic Sync. Once done browse to the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup directory in your backups. Here you may see a number of long strings, according to how many devices you sync. But, hopefully you’ll just see the one for the device in question. If you’re not sure which one then back up this whole folder on your live system before copying any data. You can use time stamps to help you make sure you’re using the right one…
Once you get the correct device backup, copy it to let’s just say the desktop. Next, right-click (or control-click if you’re still using a one-button mouse) on the iPhone and click on Restore From Backup. At this point, the phone will reboot itself and hopefully life will be good again.
Next, click on the iPhone in question from iTunes Preferences and fire back up your Automatic Sync. When the sync is done then you should be good to go. Back to normal, minus the bricked part of the phone. Once you get the hang of this you might start thinking that it sounds like an interesting way to perform mass deployment of the iPhone. But really, you’re best off using the iPhone Configuration Utility or one of the new tools springing up (like the one from KACE) for that.