Pretty awesome, right?

Almost. Restoring from an iCould backup is essentially a three-step process: restore device settings, download purchased items, and sync with iTunes.

Restore Device Settings
This part is golden. The crux of what is stored in an iCloud backup are your device settings and app data, and these are beautifully restored. Everything from playlists to Angry Birds scores are restored.

Download Purchased Items
Instead of including purchased apps and media in your iCloud backup, Apple simply re-downloads everything after you do a restore. Unfortunately, this process was only somewhat successful. All my apps downloaded fine, but I received an alert that I would need to sync with iTunes to restore my purchased media.

Sync with iTunes
This is where things start to fall apart. Since all my playlists were restored but none of my music, iTunes went ahead and mirrored those changes, deleting all the items in my playlists as a result.

I also couldn’t play any purchased media (music, books) on my iPhone.

To fix, I first had to recreate all my playlists. Not fun. Second, I had to delete all purchased media from my iPhone and re-sync it all. Also not fun.

So I didn’t lose anything in the process, minus a few playlists. No app data was deleted or, dare I say it, Angry Birds scores. But the fact remains that had I ignored iCloud and stuck with the traditional iTunes backup, none of this mess would have happened.

Sure, I wouldn’t have been able to perform an untethered restore 30 seconds after unboxing my new iPhone, but I also wouldn’t have needed to stand in the corner of the Apple store for 30 minutes waiting for all my apps to download.

You know those stupid #DIV/0! errors you get after you’ve masterfully crafted a beautiful spreadsheet that doesn’t have any data in it yet?

This fixes that.

Here’s the syntax¹:

=IF(CONDITIONAL, THEN, ELSE)

For example, if you want to display the results of A1 / A2 in A3, you’d use the following formula in A3:

=IF(A2=0, "n/a", A1/A2)

The second parameter (“n/a” above) can be anything you want, and is only displayed if the conditional is true.

1. At least in Google Docs. ↩

Except this stopped working after I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

After Googling for eons, I finally came across a fix. Though it was advertised for connecting a Squeezebox or Xbox 360, it works just as well for MacBooks and iPhones.

Start Internet Sharing
This will create a file called “bootpd.plist” in /etc. Copy this file to your desktop.¹

Stop Internet Sharing
Open “bootpd.plist” in a text editor. Look for a key called “reply_threshold_seconds” near the bottom of the file. It should have an integer value of 4. Change this value to 0 and copy the file back to /etc.

When you restart Internet Sharing everything should work again.²

1. To get to /etc, open a new Finder window, type command-shift-g and enter “/etc” in the text field. ↩
2. If it still doesn’t work, check “bootpd.plist” in /etc and make sure “reply_threshold_seconds” is still set to 0. ↩

Sir Francis Bacon

Featured Image is provided courtesy of Flickr user minnetonkafelix.