iTunesI’ve never had reason to perform a Restore operation on my iPhone 3G until the 3.1 software update. For whatever reason the iPhone became sluggish and unresponsive, then operate as normal, and back to slow.

Over the months I’ve heard of people restoring their iPhone to factory defaults and reloading their applications using the Restore function in iTunes. Thinking this was a solid process I went ahead with a Restore.

That’s where my problems began.

iTunes 9

I’m using the new iTunes 9.0 under OS X 10.5.7 which may have who-knows-what bugs. I connected my iPhone, clicked Restore, and instructed iTunes to perform a backup. Some time later the iPhone restarted and asked to be connected to iTunes. I dis-/re-connected the iPhone. iTunes recognized and activated it.

Now it gets interesting.

So Where’s the Restore?

Nothing else happened. My iPhone was devoid of my data but, fortunately, iTunes retained all of the apps and their menu placement. I anticipated being asked to perform a Restore but nothing. So I clicked Sync. Some time later the Sync was finished and my data was copied to my iPhone.

“Back in business,” I thought but wait a minute…some apps were completely missing from the iPhone and iTunes:

  • System Activity Monitor
  • TwitterFon Pro
  • PicPosterous
  • Prowl

iTunes 9 allowed me to re-download (at no charge) and the apps synced successfully to the iPhone.

This isn’t what I expected from the Restore operation. Perhaps the manual Sync is part of the process but iTunes never suggested it as the next step in the process. What’s more of a concern were the missing applications. Perhaps this is a unique occurrence or a bug in iTunes 9.

After all of this, did the Restore fix the iPhone’s performance problem? I haven’t used the phone yet so it’s too early to tell. Look for a future update.

UPDATE: some (18 to be accurate) of the apps from the Restore aren’t the latest version according to iPhone App Store.

UPDATE: thankfully this process has restored my iPhone 3.1 to what I consider normal performance.

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