As incredibly functional as the iPhone is, from time to time we find ourselves needing to restore the iPhone to its factory defaults.

By default, iTunes backs up your iPhone prior to syncing.  After restoring your iPhone to factory defaults, iTunes will allow you to restore your data from this backup, which is really great, but it’s important to note that the backup sequence does not include your media.

You will need to resync all of your Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, iTunes University tracks, and Photos. What a drag!

For many users who sync all of their media to their iPhones or iPods, this is not an issue. However, if you are like me, your music library exceeds the capacity of your iPhone many times over.  Choosing what music to put on your iPhone or iPod can be a very time-consuming process.  So here’s a workaround.

I’ve created a playlist called iPhone.

Over the course of a month or so, I’ve dragged 20GB of music to this playlist.  I then set my iPhone to sync only selected music playlists.

The next step was to choose this iPhone playlist as one of my synced playlists.

Now the next time I have to erase and restore my iPhone to solve some glitchy software issue, I can repopulate my iPhone with an approved music selection with a single click because the playlist called iPhone remains untouched in iTunes, regardless of how frequently I erase my iPhone.

Additionally, because these playlists are synced, if I get sick of listening to a particular song, I can simply remove it from the playlist in iTunes, and the next time I sync my iPhone with iTunes, the song is removed from the iPhone as well.

Easy easy easy.

- Chris Foley, foleypod.com

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