Syncing Sarah's Phone

For about a month now, Sarah has needed to have her phone looked at.  Apparently her camera is not focusing properly, which is seriously cutting into what she uses her phone for.  So she finally got an appointment at the Apple store to take it in.  However, I told her that they may need to replace it, in which case she would need to make sure she had everything on her phone currently backed up.  She hadn’t backed it up… EVER.  According to her, she was having problems with syncing every time she plugged it into her Mac, so she just never did anything about it.

So now it is about 12 hours before her appointment to take it in and she was huffing around the house.  Kris told me to go check on her and find out what the deal was.  So I go in the basement and Sarah is practically in tears because she can’t sync the phone and will have to cancel her appointment because she was not about to have phone replaced, or reset, without having all her pictures backed up (all 5000+ of them).  I asked her to plug in and let me see what was happening, but I had to wait, because her MacBook was updating, and then her phone was updating its iOS.  To which I told her she needed to regularly check to make sure there weren’t updates needed.

Once everything was ready and I could plug in and try syncing it, a message came up saying the phone could not be backed up because the Apple ID was associated with too many devices.  Which is funny because this was the only computer she has used for the last year, and before that she never backed up her phone with iTunes.  So I started looking at how to removed devices, but first I told her she should see about updating her Apple ID since it was an email address we made for her when she was in something like 4^th grade when she got her first iPod that no longer exists.  So we got into her account and updated it.  Well we probably should have reset the associated devices first, because as soon as we updated her ID, everything else stopped working (such as her imessage on the phone and MacBook) until it reset and resynced, which also took a little bit of time.  But while that was happening, Sarah was freaking out thinking that everything was broken and we had pretty much f-ed everything up.  And that had me about ready to strangle her.  These things take time and just like all millennials, she just wants it now and doesn’t bother reading instructions.

So as I sat there waiting to re-login to everything (maybe I am used to it more since this happens to me every couple of months when I reset my password at work) the individual items began resetting.  Once that was done, I went back in to reset the associated devices.  I clicked the help me link and it took me right to the instructions, and it took clicking on two buttons, and maybe two minutes for everything to be cleared out and reset.  Once that was done, I told her to plug in and the phone should sync.  A login window popped up and she logged in with the new Apple ID and boom, all done.  So all of that for a 10-15 minute fix.  Sometimes I wonder if she is ever going to be able to make it in the real world.  All it took was some patience and reading instructions.