Brad Rees

I recently upgraded my main PC, and as part of that I also had to transfer my music, photos and documents from the old machine to the new one. I used the trick here to rebuild my iTunes library on the new machine, as this allowed me to keep my ratings and playlists. This went off without a hitch. Great.

Then I plugged my iPhone in. Bad idea.

Without any warnings or confirmations it started to sync, which seemed fine as I now had a complete library of music, so I let it be. All my personal data, such as contacts and emails, lives in the cloud or on servers I have access to. Once the sync was finished I was shown a message that informed me that some of my apps were not authorised on the new machine. I fired up the iPhone, and to my dismay most of my apps had been deleted, with only a few exceptions.

The problem was that I had not yet signed into iTunes and authorised the new PC, which is quite an easy mistake to make. A warning before wiping everything would have been nice, thanks Apple. I had a look on the interwebs for a while, however this did not yield any great solutions for getting my precious apps back. The best solution was to manually go through my purchase history and re-purchase all the apps. Let me assure you this is boring, so I gave up after re-purchasing about 5 apps.

In the meantime, I decided to clean out my music folder. It was then I struck the goldmine of my old apps. iTunes saves all the downloaded apps in a directory with the extension .ipa. In my case this directory was D:\Users\Brad\Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications. For most people it will be in your My Music folder, then iTunes\Mobile Applications.

Simply click each .ipl and the app will be added back to iTunes. One sync and you should be golden.