Q: My iPod touch crashed on me the other day (possibly) after trying to download 10 applications directly on to it! It gets stuck on the Apple screen and will not even go into forced recovery mode. The kind people at the local Apple retailers are going to get me a new iPod touch to replace this unit, but I’m wondering if ALL of my settings, specifically e-mail settings, contacts, calendars, etc, will be synced onto the new device following the last backing up that was performed not too long before it crashed?
– Adam
A: The short answer is yes. As soon as you connect your new iPod touch, iTunes should detect that a backup is available from your previous unit and offer to restore it onto your new device.
Selecting this backup will restore all settings and applications that were on your device as of the last backup.
Keep in mind, however, that if the problem on your previous iPod touch was caused by software and existed before the last backup was made, you may have problems in restoring this previous backup. The time and date the backup was made will be shown on the main restore screen, so you can decide from there whether or not you actually want to restore this backup.
If you are primarily concerned about calendar, contact and e-mail information and are synchronizing this information from your computer anyway, then restoring this backup may not be completely necessary, as you can just re-sync the relevant information via iTunes onto your new iPod touch.
Note that regardless of whether you choose to restore this backup or not, you can always revert to a clean iPod touch configuration by doing a full Restore on it via iTunes itself, or you can start with a clean configuration and restore the backup later by right-clicking on your iPod touch in the iTunes Devices list and choosing “Restore” from the context menu. Backups are made on a device-by-device basis using a hardware ID of the device, so the backup from your previous iPod touch will not be overwritten by any backups created from your new iPod touch.
