Recently one of our customers deleted the FormConnect app from his iPad and reinstalled it but discovered that none of his forms were available. He was upset and wanted to know why they didn’t come across?
The answer is that his forms were stored locally on the iPad. When he deleted the app, he deleted his forms. Even though he backs up his data to iCloud every night, the App Store is not aware of this fact. It is a store where you go to purchase apps, not access your app data.
Restoring data occurs in one of two ways. Automatically or manually.
The automatic method occurs if you are running the FormConnect Pro+ app, which syncs your forms to the cloud and re-syncs it back to any of your devices when you re-download the app.
The manual method entails restoring from an iCloud backup. Below are the steps necessary to restore from a backup.
Backup Restore Instructions:
1. Open the Settings App.
2. Tap on the “General” setting.
3. Tap on the “Transfer or Reset iPad” setting.
4. Select “Erase All Content and Settings.”
5. Reinstall the iOS software.
6. Restore from a backup.
Note that restoring from a backup is only as good as your backup frequency. For example, if you backup every other day, any data that had been saved during that interim period would be lost for good.
Most of our customer’s data was restored thankfully, but this manual process was a real inconvenience and interrupted his day and caused him to cancel several customer appointments. After experiencing this loss of data and what it took to recover, our customer upgraded to the FormConnect Pro+ app. His rational was the little extra cost to upgrade more than outweighed the cost of not having access to his data during the day.
Something to ponder.
