Stefan Mileschin

Syncing your existing iOS device with a new computer can be a daunting task, especially when you don’t want to lose any data that’s already on the device. Making the new computer accept your iOS device can be difficult, but certainly not impossible. So let’s go ahead and see how you can sync your existing iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad with a new computer, without losing any existing content on the device.

Please note, although you might be able to get almost all of your data back on the iOS device once you’re able to sync with the new computer, but probably not everything (play counts, etc.). We don’t intend to leave anything behind, but failure is always an option. Proceed with caution at all times. And even though you might not have an iPod to deal with, check out the previous part of this guide based on iPods, it has lots of stuff to refer from, and is linked several times in this post. Keep reading.

As mentioned in the previous part of the guide, ‘syncing with a new computer’ essentially means making iTunes on the new computer accept your device as it is. In such a case when you connect your existing iOS device with a new computer, iTunes would usually offer you to ‘erase and replace’ all the content on the device with the data in the new computer’s iTunes library. Of course, you wouldn’t want to do that. We’ve covered this before, if you have the older computer up and running (or a backup of it), you can transfer the iTunes library from that computer to the new one, and Apple officially supports you doing so. But if you’re trying to sync your iOS device with a new computer while the old computer has given up (and if you don’t have a backup at hand), things will be a lot more complex. Last time, we showed you how to sync an iPod with a new computer without losing data, and it was a pretty easy task. For iOS, things are a little different. There’s much more content that has to be backed up before you proceed.

Speaking of backup, Apple has introduced a new feature for backups, and it’s called iCloud. You can set up iCloud, so that all the data on your device is constantly synced to the cloud. Once you want to sync with a new computer, you can provide it with your iCloud ID and password, and all your data will be downloaded to that computer. It’s that simple, but as long as your device is running iOS 5.

http://www.howtogeek.com/104298/sync...t-losing-data/