backup and sync failures

Fri, 02/06/2009 - 21:04 — battlewagon

Hi, I first downloaded Stanza in December of '08 and loved it, I immediately invested a ton of time downloading free titles from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere, I also shared pretty much the complete Baen Free Library with Stanza Desktop. In short, I love the program, I've read 9 or ten books in the 2 months or so that I've had the Iphone and I can safely say that it is my most used app.

Here's where the "However" comes in.

I had originally over the course of a week downloaded almost 900 titles, yes I went a little crazy but that didn't even make an appreciable dent in the 8 gigs of storage my base model Iphone 3G comes with. The problem came when I decided to upgrade my firmware from 2.1 to 2.2. Before upgrading I tried to back up my phone at least 5 times, it would take anywhere from 6 to ten hours and never would complete. I didn't sync my applications because I was silly enough to think that the word "backup" meant the same thing on itunes that it does elsewhere in the computer world, IE; saves all your good stuff. Regardless, the backups never finished no matter what arcane steps I took. Eventually I got fed up enough that I called apple support and over the course of three days and 6 calls they came to two conclusions, that the problem was stanza and that the backup might work after the firmware upgrade. They also told me that my app data (ie books) wouldn't be deleted in the upgrade, so I but the bullet and did so.

It erased everything.

So here I was almost two months later, I had perhaps three hundred books on my phone again, being still slightly singed from the last adventure.

There was a new firmware update available.

The backup function still wasn't working in 2.2 but after extensive googling and reading several posts on this forum that indicated that "backup" had nothing to do with saving my books and "sync" was what I was looking for and reading time and time again that that syncing my apps would save my books I did so. It seemed like it was successful until the the Iphone again wiped my apps and other data and I tried to restore my precious tomes by syncing the apps.

Well, it restored my apps all right, and even stanza, but my preferences and every single book was gone.

So tell me, is there something obvious that I'm missing? Is there some safe upper limit to how many books I can have on my iphone and still be able to sync the app and use the backup function? Or is Lexcycle going to point the blame towards Apple like Apple is pointing the blame towards you?

Thanks for reading this massive wall of text, I'll be checking back to see if I get a response between downloading books again one by one. I love this program but it's getting to be too much of a massive time thief.

possibly applicable info:

windows XP home edition, SP3
Itunes 8.0.2.2
Stanza 1.7 (app)
Stanza version 1.0.0-beta15 build #1:389 (desktop)
Iphone Firmware 2.1 then 2.2, currently 2.21

Sun, 02/08/2009 - 15:23 — battlewagon

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Sat, 02/07/2009 - 15:17 — Emily

Backing up is part of

Backing up is part of the sync process. You'll notice that although you can manually stop a backup by clicking on the little "x", there isn't really an option in iTunes to make the iPhone not backup unless you also tell it not to sync. Books are considered application data, so if you were not syncing your applications or if you were stopping the backup process manually during a sync, then you were not backing up your books.

That being said, you should not have to back up unless you are thinking you might have to do a full restore of your phone. Apple told you that you didn't need to back up before doing the upgrade, and that is my understanding, as well. If all of your applications and application data get deleted during an upgrade, then that is a bug with Apple's iPhone OS upgrading process.

Stanza itself does not interact with the backup process or with the upgrade process. Stanza stores application data (in this case, your preferences and books) exactly the way other apps do, and Stanza conforms to all of Apple's other requirements. Apple sets no limits on the amount of application data that can be stored, and as you correctly pointed out, the actual amount of space taken up by books is not at all large, especially compared to the storage required for images and music. If the backup doesn't work because of something having to with Stanza, as Apple seems to have told you, then there is a bug in the iPhone backup process and not in Stanza, since Stanza meets all of Apple's very stringent requirements.

We have many users who store many books like you do, and we have not had any other reports of problems with backing up or with the behavior you describe for the iPhone upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2 or from 2.2 to 2.2.1. However, since Apple's backup and upgrade processes seem to have trouble dealing either with your phone or with your particular collection of books, you might want to consider storing fewer books on your iPhone, until Apple takes care of the problem or changes the requirements for third-party apps.

By the way, thanks for continuing to use Stanza in spite of the problems you encountered. We appreciate your support.

Sun, 02/08/2009 - 15:23 — battlewagon

I never stopped the backup

I never stopped the backup manually unless the phone was still backing up after over twelve hours, one would think that that is a reasonable time frame. Other times it ended the back up with an error.

Of course, it backed up in about 30 seconds when Stanza *wasn't* installed, although the only times I tried the backup process was after I already had a 200 or more books. Just because no one else has noted the issue doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist, I'd imagine the number of people with 1000 books installed wouldn't be *too* huge of a number since titles must be loaded one at a time. That's how many were on it the first time the files failed to follow the app when I upgraded firmware (as I noted in my first post). The second time I upgraded my firmware and lost everything I *only* had 330 or so titles loaded. You said "You should not have to back up unless you are thinking you might have to do a full restore of your phone." Tell me, does anyone carry around one of these things *without* being prepared to restore it? I don't like the idea of losing the huge investment of time it takes to upload my library one by one and customize the phone to my liking as much as Apple allows. To say that Stanza doesn't interact with the backup process is kind of missing the point, Stanza is the reason I was bothering to backup in the first place. So taking into account the fact that backups were seamless without stanza and didn't work at all with stanza kind of indicates to my way of thinking that stanza just *may* be a contributing factor.

My theory at this point is that Stanza may have been corrupted when I first downloaded it through the App store on my phone. Most of my books the first time were also downloaded wirelessly as well. I recently just uninstalled Stanza desktop again along with Itunes and every other related program on my computer including all that hidden stuff in "C:\Documents and Settings \"user name"\Local Settings\Application Data" so that prefs and corrupted backups wouldn't come back to haunt me. I then did a hard restore of the Iphone under Setting>General>Reset>Erase All Contents and Settings.

Since all of my other data, Contacts etc syncs just fine it's merely painful instead of excruciating to do so. I then downloaded Stanza through Itunes and synced it over to the phone. I immediately did a manual backup(with no crash reporting) and it only took thirty seconds so if it really *was* a corrupted download it should be fixed.

However, just in the interests of science, I'm going take a few hours tomorrow to attempt to load 100 titles at a time and then immediately backup until I get up to my former exalted 1000 title station and note the time each backup takes. It may have been a combination of things, but it I reach that number again and it downloads in any kind of a reasonable timeframe I'll call my hypothesis about the corrupted file correct.

What I *really* can't wait for is implementation of bulk uploads, or at least the ability to cue them automatically.

We'll see, I understand that development is still ongoing but honestly for as much time as I've spent on the program I'm starting to doubt it's ultimate utility value. I think I've actually reached the point where I've spent almost as much time trying to get things to work as I have you know, *reading*.

Thanks anyway, I do appreciate the app and enjoy it when I'm not mindlessly clicking buttons to upload books.

Sun, 02/08/2009 - 15:57 — itimpi

I have found that rather than

I have found that rather than keep a very large number of books on my iPhone, I have concentrated on getting my own personal ebook library visible wherever I am via the Stanza Online Catalog facility. To make that work well I wrote the calibre2Web utility that works in conjunction with the open-source Calibre library management software to generate a personal structured catalog similiar to the pre-supplied ones. That way I store all my ebooks under a web server (which I run on a NAS box on my local LAN), and have online access to that from anwhere either via WiFi or via the 3G phone network. It by-passes the need to use Stanza desktop to tranfer files to the iPhone.

The approach works extremely well and, since I have immediate online access from anywhere to download new books, I do not feel a compulsion to keep a large number on my phone. The books on the web server are backed up via my normal data backup processes for data held on PC type drives. I also use Calibre to do any conversion to epub required, but that is a personal preference as I find it more convenient than Stanza desktop.

Sun, 02/08/2009 - 19:10 — battlewagon

I had thought about that and

I had thought about that and I've heard good things about Calibre, but I don't have a website and don't have an old box to use as a web server, I mostly keep so many books on because there's always 4 or 5 books laying around my place with cracked spines and the "latest read" function of Stanza is a pretty simple way to replicate my real world reading habits. And as for having a huge number, well, I just like to.

It doesn't take up much space compared to the memory on the Iphone and probably half of the stuff I read is sci fi stuff that comes in a long series, it's nice to just work your way straight through. When it comes down to it I was hoping to spend one big chunk of time uploading stuff and not have to worry about it for another six months. Plenty of people carry around 10000 songs and listen to just a small portion, it's not necessarily sensible but hey, if they had told you 20 years ago that today you could carry an entire library on your mobile vocal-telegraph supercomputer, well that just might make the fact that we *still* don't have flying cards hurt a bit less.

I guess if my little experiment tells me that there is a reasonable upper limit to the books I can tote around I'll just have to come up witha streamlined "playlist", but hopefully not.

Actually, just thinking about it, updating every 100 books might negate my hypothesis, it seems like the backup process that Apple uses just looks for the Δ between the the old data state(backup) and the new data state, that would make sense. That *might* mean that you can have as many books on there as you please as long as you backup incrementally and not try to add a thousand individual files to new backup in one go. Who knows, I'll find out tomorrow.