Upgrading and Restoring

Two years ago, just after we got married, we got iPhones. Life with Nella, as I christened my phone, was fabulous. She came with me everywhere: to the beach, on amusement park rides, indoor rock-climbing, out on snowy wintertime walks, on bicycle rides, and on countless little adventures. I dropped her only once and she sustained no damage. Nella was everything: my connection to the world (my constant link to email and facebook), my mini diary (storing scores of little memories), my planner (holding not only my calendar, but reminders and To Do lists too) and my entertainment. Let's face it: Nella became my addiction.

This month, we were due for an upgrade with AT&T. An upgrade! I tried to be excited, but I was a little sad. What would life be like with a new, better iPhone? How could I betray Nella? Hadn't she been such a friend to me?

At the AT&T store two Fridays ago we learned that our new phones would be $100 each, but that we could likely get trade-in credit for our old iPhones if we were willing to trade them in. That sounded ok as long as I could keep everything Nella had been storing for me for two years. So we talked to Krista about retrieving apps from the cloud and were assured that contacts and photos could also be transferred to the new phone via a fancy schmancy iPhone machine.

Then I asked about texts and notes and voice recordings. These, I was told, were associated with the phone and would not come over through the magic machine. I panicked. I need my notes. Not only do I have notes of Christmas gift ideas and to do lists and important things to remember, but I have memorable quotes from my old people - funny, one-of-a-kind sentences uttered impulsively by my clients with dementia, an irreplaceable record of cute things they said. So I frantically started emailing the notes to myself. Then I did the same with voice recordings, which were also from my clients.Even as I preserved these little memories by emailing them to myself, I felt sad to give up Nella. What is it about a piece of machinery that takes such a place in your heart? Why does a bundle of plastic and metal matter so much? I hope I'm not alone in thinking that it does.

In the meantime, Marquita got Husby's new phone set up and plugged in for the transfer of data. She looked up the serial number of his old phone and found it would be a trade-in value of $64. This was better than we thought! We'd only pay $36 for the new iPhone! My phone came out to the same value.

Husband's data transfer, Marquita learned when she plugged in the two phones, would take 35 minutes. This was OK since we had both brought our books. We sat in the car for half an hour, waiting for the transfer to be done. When we came back into the store, Marquita's face was grim. Husband's transfer had completed just fine. However, when she plugged in my two phones, the transfer time was estimated at two hours. Marquita didn't want to tie up the magic iPhone transfer machine for two hours - and we didn't really want to wait another two hours in the parking lot - so she suggested I take the two phones home, copy what I wanted to save onto my computer, then plug in my new iPhone and copy the pictures onto it. This sounded logical. So we took Husby's new iPhone, and my two phones back home.

I looked at over 1100 pictures that night. That's how many pictures were on my iPhone. Two years of sunset pictures, food pictures, dressing room shots, and should-I-buy-this photos I'd texted to friends. That night I went through all the pictures and whittled it down to just about 300. Then, I plugged Nella into the computer and copied those pictures onto the hard drive. When I plugged the new phone in, it opened in iTunes and asked me a deep and distressing question.

You have previously synced another Apple device to this computer. Do you want to restore the current device from Brittany's iPhone or set it up as a new device? 

Restore? Restore is a bad word. Restore means delete. Overwrite. Eliminate. Restore is anything but restorative, in the technological sense. Restoring is losing. But yet, setting it up as a new device seemed silly too since the old device, known to my PC as Brittany's iPhone and to me as Nella, was no longer going to exist in my life.

Puzzled, I called AT&T. The operator who answered knew nothing. She transferred me to the Apple department. Ah, I thought. The Apple Department. Someone living in California who works for Apple, has a view of palm trees outside her cubicle window, makes tons of money, owns at least two iPads, has sassy piercings in her eyebrows and works overtime at the Genius Bar for fun. Surely, she will know about restoring. I explained my plight: to restore or not to restore.

"Hmm," she said. "I really have no idea. You can always go to apple dot com slash support and type in your question there."

I love Apple - really, I do. But I was disappointed.

I said thanks anyway, and hung up.

And now the question burned into my eyes from the screen. Restore? Or set up as new device? You must choose!

I felt like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, squeezing shut her eyes, turning her face away, and signing on the line under "for all eternity."

I clicked "Restore."

The next forty-five minutes were torture. The progress bar just crawled from left to right at an absolute snail's pace. I was a wreck. What was happening! Would my brand-new iPhone be wiped clean from this restoration? It was a feeling of sheer panic.

I confess: I am slightly embarrassed about all this. I stared at that progress bar for nearly the entire forty-five minutes. Except for the few minutes when I closed me eyes to let Husband pray for me. Yes, I needed God's hand of peace. It was that bad. In that interminable block of time, I grew increasingly aware of how insignificant my worries really were. So what if I lost everything. I'm sure the phone would still work. And hadn't I copied or emailed to myself everything important anyway? What if it woke up from its long restoration and was blank. Wouldn't a fresh start be a bit, well, refreshing? Did I need the emotional and digital baggage that Nella had so willingly carried for me for so long?

I was just on the cusp of admitting that it would be OK to see my new phone wake up empty and memory-less when the restoration completed. The iPhone shut down, and booted back up. And what was there after the restoration?

Everything. When she woke up, Stella (I think I'll call her Stella) had Nella's wallpaper on her lock screen and home screen. She had my text message history. She had my notes, my photos, my recent calls log, and my alarms. My apps were even all back in the same places. Stella was Nella, reincarnated! Restored!

I didn't need to drag the photos I'd copied onto my hard drive over onto Stella. And it was a good thing because it turned out not to work anyway. I had everything I'd been so worried about right there.

The next day when I took Nella back to the AT&T store to trade her in, she was only worth $55. The day before she'd been valued at $64 and I was a little annoyed. Krista at the store said the values change by the day, so I could try again another day, but I didn't want to come back. So I took the $55. It was worth the nine dollar loss in order to have Stella be my new Nella.

For a few hours, the night before, Nella and Stella had been together. I carried them both from room to room, little twins.

I asked, when I finally turned Nella in, where the trade-in iPhones go. Nobody seemed to know. They just get packed in white boxes and mailed back to the iPhone return center. Nella's memory has been wiped, and as much as I wish she were like C3PO who will start a new life somewhere never knowing the adventures he had before his memory was cleared, I know Nella is just glass and plastic and metal and she never knew anything to begin with. Maybe the term "memory" for electronic devices is a little misleading to emotional people like me.

Anyway, the whole point here is two-fold.

First, if you are going to get a new iPhone, do it the way I did. Buy the new one at full price. Then take the old one and the new one home, plug in the old one and let iTunes back it up. Then plug in the new one and choose Restore. You don't need to freak out for 45 minutes like I did. Go take a walk. Or a shower. Or a nap. Relax. It's restoring. Soon, your new iPhone will be just like your old one and - if you're lucky - she'll have a rhyming name.

Secondly, distance yourself from your digital appliances. The panic I felt when Stella was restoring from Nella's backup was unhealthy. My priorities are mixed up if I feel this way over a phone. Yes, take care of your things. Especially your expensive things. But lay up more treasures in heaven than in your pocket. Every now and then, turn that phone off.

Unplug.
Restore.