Restore Your iPhone Without Losing Your Homescreen Organisation

When restoring your iPhone (or other iDevice), all the meticulous work you put into your homescreen’s organisation is lost. Even if you only have a handful of apps, this is frustrating. Fortunately Dan Frakes, over at MacWorld, has discovered a way to solve the problem.

When you restore your iPhone, everything gets wiped clean before your information is put back on the device. Your homescreen organisation, folders and all, is actually added back as well. The problem is that your third-party apps are no longer on your phone — because you have yet to sync it — and so it doesn’t really matter that your iDevice knows how to organise them. It can’t organise what doesn’t exist. What Dan discovered is that after you perform this first restore and sync your phone, you can perform a second restore that doesn’t wipe your phone. This will restore your homescreen organisation back to its former glory. Here’s what you do:

1. Assuming you’ve already done a standard restore and your homescreen is a mess, connect your iPhone (or other iDevice) to iTunes.
2. If you haven’t sync’d everything back to your device already, do that now.
3. When it shows up in iTunes, and has finished syncing, right click its icon/name in the sidebar. This will bring up a menu with a few options, one of which is “Restore from Backup”. Choose it.
4. You’ll be asked to choose a backup. Choose the same backup you chose when you restored your device earlier.
5. Let the syncing process finish and you’ll be back to normal.

Very handy.

Maintain app organisation when restoring iOS devices [MacWorld]