When restoring (UN-jailbreaking) doesn’t restore everything
As much as I loved having a jailbroken iPhone, I decided to UN-jailbreak my phone in anticipation of the new 3.0 software update. I also had been experiencing some increasingly frequent crashes to the springboard, as well as what I perceived to be a general slowness to the phone, and figured maybe a factory restore would set things right.
In order to undo the Jailbreak, I figured all I needed to do was hit the “restore” button in iTunes, and then restore the iPhone from a previous backup. However, once the iPhone had completed its cycle, I noticed three odd things:
Apparently three of my customization options held through a restore: Erica Sadun’s Make It Mine (which let’s you change the carrier name from AT&T or what have you), and my numeric Wi-Fi strength and numeric battery level indicators ( I think I used Big Boss Prefs for those, although it was so long ago I don’t remember).
I’m not sure how those hacks went about making their changes to the iPhone’s OS, but for some reason I assumed a full restore would overwrite those changes. Probably somewhere in their documentation they said “Remember to undo us BEFORE your unjailbreak”, but I of course never read such things, as I assume many of you don’t either, so I figured I would just post this as an FYI for anyone else who will be un-jailbreaking. It will be interesting to see if any of these preferences hold through the 3.0 update next week (actually I believe Apple is enabling a numeric battery on their own. So maybe I will have two…) 
Macenstein's "Mac Chick of the Month" (June 2010): Daniella
Macenstein's "Mac Chick of the Month" (January 2011): Monica Roach
Macenstein's "Mac Chick of the Month" (September 2010): Ancilla Tilia
These settings are restored from your backup in iTunes, so therefore you have numerical battery.
You restored a backup after installing iPhone os 3.0 right?
those hacks just change the preferences file for springboard, which gets backed up with everything else in iPhone backups. iPhone internally supports all of them, just there isn’t any official GUI for setting them.
If you choice to not start from a backup, and choose to start fresh, those disappear.
You restored your backup!
Just restore and DO NOT use your BACKUP…
Those hacks are just preferences stuffs.
It’s best to use Cydia to uninstall the third party apps you installed from that installer then reboot the iPhone before selecting “restore” in iTunes. Once the restore is completed you should be okay to update the iPhone to 3.0.
Obviously I’m not the only one experiencing a general slowness on his iPhone. I’m also in need for a general restore but I don’t think it makes sense right now because I could also restore to 3.0 on Thursday, right?
Yeah, what they said, plus:
You will *also* see these things on 3.0 should you restore from the backup it makes before you install it
-K
Things carry over even when you sync to a new iPhone.
On my new 3GS, I can’t see any of the app store apps I had hidden with Categories on my 3G.
Even if I delete them in iTunes, sync, then reinstall (either on the App Store app, or via iTunes) they still don’t show up on the iPhone.
If I install via the App Store, I see the app icon and the blue download bar, and then POOF.
Guess I either reset the iPhone and manually install everything, or I wait until the 3GS is jailbreakable, which seems to be soon…
Good reason not to have 100 apps hidden in Categories, I guess. Ugh.