I wrote recently about iCloud back-ups failing on my devices after installing iOS 9. This story is, to my mind, a big deal, but has been curiously ignored by the majority of the tech press. As I noted, it’s clearly not sexy enough, and perhaps suffers from site owners/writers not having the problem themselves.

About a week ago, I was trying to troubleshoot this problem yet again and made my now regular trip to Settings > iCloud > Backup, waiting for it to state my iPhone 6s had never been backed up. Instead, it smugly noted it had backed-up overnight. This came as something of a surprise. The iPad, by contrast, still resolutely refused to back anything up at all.

I subsequently checked in every day to see what was happening. Most nights — although not all — since, the iPhone has backed-up to iCloud. Then, out of the blue, the iPad started backing up, too. If you’re now  eager to know, here’s the fix that I used to get all this working: nothing at all.

While typing this article, I almost misspelled iCloud as ‘iClod’, but that might actually be more appropriate. It’s pretty clear there are some fairly big issues with Apple’s infrastructure right now, perhaps related to its large number of users combined with new rollouts of hardware and software. And it’s notable that things aren’t entirely fixed for me either. My iPhone 5s currently states tyne “last backup could not be completed”, which was the error I previously got from the other devices. I’m also finding apps sporadically ‘stick’ when I’m trying to update them using the App Store.

What worries me more is how many people told me they were informed by Apple to wipe their devices clean and set them up as new, specifically to deal with the problem of iCloud back-ups. Data loss is almost never a solution to a technical problem, and it certainly shouldn’t be when it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple’s servers (or a combination of them and software bugs) are to blame. Certainly, if Apple ever wants iOS to be a properly professional platform, it’s not acceptable than even a small number of users will every year or two have to abandon everything and start from scratch.