Nikon D4 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 140mm — ¹/2000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Muddy Fun
kids' soccer at Mitsuike Sports Ground (三ツ池運動公園) in Kusatsu Japan

Well, that wasn't fun. While at Anthony's soccer game the other day, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket to find that a couple of apps had been “pocket deleted”, with the screen showing the dialog to confirm the deletion of a third. Apparently I put the phone in my pocket without deactivating the screen, and it bumped around in there in the just the appropriate way to jump through the hoops to delete an app. Twice. I should have had my pocket play the lottery that day.

I've been “pocket dialed” by friends before... the call comes in and all I hear is background noise or them chatting with someone without realizing that their phone has called me. This is the first time I've heard of apps getting deleted by accident this way, and the first time I've personally experienced my phone doing “pocket” anything, other than sitting there.

To make things worse, the two apps that had been deleted where the two apps I use the most (WhatsApp Messenger and Find my Friend), and to make it even super worster, those two apps have a lot of local data (permissions, history, connections, etc.) that are gone the moment you delete them, requiring a lot of hassle to set up again, so I couldn't just re-download from the Apple App Store™ and continue on my merry way. Arrrgh!.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Searching for a Solution

To avoid having to set up the apps again, I had the bright idea of restoring the phone from a recent backup once I got home. iTunes makes a backup of the phone data when syncing, and I'd done it recently, so I though it would be a simple matter of pressing the “restore from backup” button in iTunes, but no, that results in a frustratingly final error message: "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because not enough free space is available on the iPhone." This made no sense to me because I wasn't asking for a second copy of everything to be added to the phone, but a simple(?) rsync-like “make sure what's supposed to be there is actually there” synchronization. It was extra frustrating because the error message gave no hint on how to proceed.

It turns out that the way around this is to reset the phone to its factory settings, then restore from backup. After doing the reset, iTunes treated it as if it was a new phone, asking “Do you want to set this up as a new phone, or restore from the ‘Jeff's iPhone’ backup we found lying around?”

I restored from backup, and 40 minutes of “doing stuff” in the background later, my phone was back to its pre-“pocket delete” glory. I'll have to be more careful next time.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Right Stuff
pitch warriors