Mrs.Chaos’ iPhone stopped correctly syncing music a couple months ago. We disabled music sync, let all the songs get remove, and turned it back on and it barely put songs onto it. She left it with me one night to fix and I realied what was happening is that the sync would timeout after 2 minutes which meant it would only sync 10-20 songs each time it sync’ed. I did the obvious thing… wrote and AppleScript that just looped for ever and triggered sync every 3 minutes. After an hour or so - all the songs were back on! Problem solved.
Except last week she wanted to add more songs onto the iPhone. When I talked about the process of the sync loop she gave me, “you’re kidding me.” Look. Finally she said, “Look - you’re my techie husband, and you need to solve this for me.” When she asks for tech help on things she can figure out, I tell her, and she handles it on her own. She rarely asks for tech help that’s truly behond her, so when she asks for real, I gotta help.
The plan was to was to wipe and restore - but backup failed with “Device has been disconnected.” AHA! A hint! I tried a backup on my computer and it worked find. AHA! I deleted the local backups and the lockdown files and BOOM, everything working again.