From Disappointment to Delight
A neighbor asked me to come over because he wanted to make sure his wife's iPhone was getting backed up properly before she leaves on a business trip. I know he originally had not created a separate user account on his Mac so I wasn't really sure if it was backing up or not.
It turned out he had created a user account for her but had never synced to it. I got iTunes set up for her but when I went to sync, of course none of her applications were in her iTunes library. iTunes said it would replaces the contents of the iPhone with the contents of her iTunes library (which basically means removing all her apps). I took screenshots of her various home screen pages so that should anything get deleted, we would at least know what she had installed.
I clicked the Sync button, acknowledged that it was going to replace her iPhone with the contents of the iTunes Library and expected she would have to spend some time reinstalling apps. But no. To my delight, iTunes suddenly announced that there were apps on the iPhone that were not in the iTunes library and would we like to copy them to it? While I was surprised that it didn't initially ask me this I was quite happy that it ultimately did. We finished syncing and her iPhone was all set up and ready to go.
That was a pleasant surprise.