Before I get into the full swing of this post. Happy 2012 to you all and I hope it was a happy, safe and profitable Christmas and New Year season. Certainly was here!

But now, onto the subject of the blog, which is above. Not going to retype it here I’d just be repeating myself! Back in November of 2011 I upgraded my cellphone as my service contract was coming to a close and I was offered a discount on a new handset to re-sign with my current provider. Stupid not to really when you consider the discount was pretty significant. I re-signed and walked out of my local providers shop with a shiny new iPhone 4S. Pretty nice considering my old phone, the iPhone 3GS, was getting a little long in the tooth and iOS 5 was getting a bit slow and crabby on it. After a couple of hassles transferring number from SIM to SIM (since the 4S uses micro-SIM modules and my old 3GS uses a standard SIM) my new toy was all working nicely and I remember sitting there drooling over the sheer speed of it.

Then came the pain.

I managed to pull most of everything from the old 3GS to the new 4S doing a restore via iCloud. Contacts and misc settings came across no problems along with wallpapers and apps from the app store all re-downloaded without too much fuss. Just took some time. You’re probably wondering where the pain comes in, because all that there sounds nice and easy and you probably now want to hit me for being a whiny bitch about it. The pain comes in the form of transferring over information for apps used for things like Two-Factor Authentication. Apps like Google Authenticator and Blizzard Authenticator dropped their info. I only found this out after I went to use them about a week after I’d gotten my new phone and the old one had gone into a drawer somewhere to await a new life as a test unit for a few ideas I have in my head. What ensued was an hour or so finding my old phone, getting all the appropriate restore codes and such to move the tokens over to my new phone.

Such is the world of a smartphone user now I guess. Gone are the days of just swapping SIM module and carrying on. So much data gets stored on the phone itself that you have to be careful with everything and if you’re on-selling old gear, you have to make sure it’s properly “restored to factory” lest you become a target for identity theft. And make sure before you begin to swap to a new phone you note down any restore codes for authentication token apps. It’ll probably save you a lot of pain and frustration later.