One of the many promises of iOS 5 was that it would lead us out of the wired wilderness and into the modern world of over the air updates, syncing, and backups. Anyone with iPhones and iPads knows the pain of constantly having to tether their devices to their computer just to update things like podcasts, and to make sure apps and settings are backed up. Now those things can be done over Wi-Fi, provided a few conditions are met.
Two of those elements, syncing and backups, do or can involve iTunes running on a Mac or PC. Unfortunately, how this works isn’t immediately clear. I noticed another person in my Twitter stream who was equally confused about the backup portion of the equation, specifically as to when backups would occur when syncing an iDevice over Wi-Fi. I’d also seen some comments that Wi-Fi sync would only happen when the device was connected to power, which I personally knew wasn’t true. So I decided to do some testing to figure out exactly what the requirements for Wi-Fi syncing and backups were.
Guest report from occasional contributor Susan
A month or so ago, I noticed that my iPhone 3G was not updating when I made changes to either my Address Book or iCal on my one year old MacBook, so I made an appointment at my local Tucson Apple Store. Things have changed at the perpetually busy Genius Bar; iPhone techs now meet their clients at the front of the store, which is always very crowded with customers. These days, there are often more people in the Apple Store than in the rest of the stores combined in the upscale shopping plaza where Apple is located. Sad for those others, but I wish Apple would move into larger premises.
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