It has come to our attention that there is a potential for inadvertent loss of data in STRIP for customers who have purchased a new iPhone to replace an existing one. This may also affect other iOS devices such as iPod Touch and iPad.
When setting up a new iPhone in iTunes, iTunes offers to restore the data from your old device on to the new one. It would seem that in some cases the process appears to have been completed successfully, but the user later discovers that while Contacts and data from other default applications is transferred successfully, STRIP and other downloaded applications are missing their data. Some users have found (including us personally) that doing a second “Restore from Backup…” operation completes the migration successfully.
However, some users don’t notice the failed migration right away, and have at times discarded the old device (thus losing access to its copy of Strip’s data), or have synced their iPhone with iTunes since the initial Restore, which has the effect, in some cases, of wiping out the old backups maintained by iTunes. In that unlikely situation, it becomes nearly impossible to recover the user’s data.
Avoiding the Problem Before You Make the Switch
If you are planning to migrate to a new device or upgrade your iOS operating system, you’ll want to do the following before you make the switch. We’ll go through the various steps below.
- Disable automatic syncing in iTunes
- Turn off encrypted back up (temporarily)
- Take a fresh backup in iTunes, explicitly
- Use Strip Sync to take an independent backup of your data
As always, we are here if you run into trouble, please get in touch.
Disable automatic syncing in iTunes
Make sure your iPhone is disconnected from your computer. Open up iTunes, go to Preferences → Devices, and make sure the checkbox “Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically” is checked.
Turn off encrypted backup (temporarily)
Connect your iPhone (or iPad or iPod Touch) to your computer with the USB cable that came with your device. If iTunes is not running, start it. Once the device appears in the left-hand side of the iTunes window, click on it to bring up the Summary screen. Scroll down to Options, and make sure that “Encrypt iPhone backup” is not checked.
Take a fresh backup in iTunes, explicitly
Every time you sync, iTunes will take a fresh backup, but it doesn’t necessarily keep that backup around for later. Doing it explicitly will keep the backup around for later in case we need to do a Restore.
In iTunes, with your phone still connected, right click on your phone’s icon and name in the left-side view of iTunes. In the menu that comes up, select “Back Up” to initiate a fresh, unencrypted back up.
The process may take a few minutes to complete.
If you had turned off encrypted backup in the previous step, you can now turn it back on.
Use Strip Sync to take an independent backup of your data
To ensure that you can have an independent backup outside of iTunes, we’ve published a free companion utility for Mac OS X and Windows called Strip Sync. It is important that you download and configure Strip Sync on your desktop. Once installed you’ll be able to sync your data off your iPhone and into Strip Sync over WiFi.
You can download Strip Sync for free over here: http://getstrip.com/strip-sync
Be sure to follow the setup instructions for your operating system:
Strip Sync works over WiFi on your home or office. If you have problems syncing the most likely cause is a firewall or network issue, and a good first step is to ensure your workstation firewall is disabled or at least allowing incoming connections. Do get in touch with us if you need help.
There’s an updated version of Codebook in the App Store, v1.3.0, which fixes a bit of a nuisance bug with regard to timestamps.
We’ve received a few requests recently to provide an online or cloud-based backup/sync solution for our password manager Strip, in particular as to whether we plan to add an integration with Dropbox, so we figured now is a good time to provide a statement with regards to what direction we’re going.
We do not have plans to provide an integration with Dropbox for Strip at this time. While we agree an online backup would a really cool and useful feature, we’re uncomfortable with tying a core part of the product to another service that might change without consultation. That’s not to say anything at all about the utility or stability of Dropbox (it’s a really useful service done very well), but decisions made at Dropbox will always be out of our control.
Any online backup would require that the database file be stored remotely in an unknown location, with unknown security risks. That scenario makes us and many of our customers nervous, so we are reluctant to move in this direction without serious planning and risk evaluation.
We’ll continue to investigate the possibility of an online backup for Strip, but in the mean time, Strip can be backed up to the desktop with Strip Sync, providing multi-device replication. Our implementation requires authentication, and the files are always encrypted and secured on your local computers.
A new update to Strip, our password manager for the iPhone, has been approved by the Apple iTunes App Store, version 1.4.8. This is mostly a bug-fix release for version 1.4.7, and makes the changes list below. While this is a minor update, all users are strongly recommended to backup their data and update to the latest version to ensure compatibility with future versions of Strip.
- Fixes crash on auto-save of Note during fast-app switching on iOS 4.
- Autosave is now enabled when editing Notes with a hardware keyboard.
- Displays GUID of data entities to facilitate sync support requests and debugging.
- Corrects icon display on import.
- Fixes a couple of NIB-related crashes introduced by iOS4.
- Corrects a typo in one of the dialog prompts.
More updates are on the way, but they’re still a few weeks out, so make sure you get the latest and greatest. [ Get it on iTunes ]
Updated: 6/6/2012 This blog post is out of date, and the software referenced in it, Strip Sync, has been discontinued in favor of Strip for Windows and Strip for OS X.
As many of our customers have already noticed, we’ve made Strip Sync for Mac OS X and Windows generally available. It serves as a free a companion utility to Strip 1.4 for iOS, the first version of Strip to support our new Sync feature. More accurately, Strip supports multi-device replication, allowing you to safely replicate your data across any number of devices. Strip is the first password manager we know of with this kind of awesome and lightning fast sync system.
No longer will our dear customers be relying on and subsequently let down by iTunes for backups and data recovery. Every time you sync your device with Strip Sync, a backup copy of the local database on your desktop is taken for you. You can revert to any of your backups at any time, and the sync service also provides authoritative data restore.
Strip Sync also provides CVS import and export. This allows you to export your database to a spreadsheet that you could print and store in a safe. It also allows you to bulk load new entries, and in the case of the Mac OS X version, you can do bulk updates as well (e.g. export the existing database to spreadsheet, make edits, and import the same sheet).
Now that more folks are seeing what Strip Sync is – or rather, that it’s not a full desktop port of Strip, thus the qualified name – we’ve been getting questions about a full desktop port. We’re working on it! It’s next on the list, Strip Sync had to come first. You can expect minor updates to Strip Sync in the next few weeks as we make some minor improvements (and add bulk-updating to the Windows version).
I should add that there a ton of other improvements to Strip itself in the 1.4 upgrade (free for those who’ve purchased Strip already), including improvements to the display of data, the ability to work with stored data quickly (copying, launching, etc), and better performance to boot.
With regard to iOS 4, things are looking pretty good so far. We have no plans at the moment to take advantage of new features in the SDK just yet, as our primary concern is stability and compatibility. We do have upcoming improvements planned for the 1.4 version of Strip and if any bugs pop up we should be able to address them in forthcoming updates.