With the recent releases of many great looking games that don't properly run on iPad 3's, I finally took the step to upgrade for an Air 2. However, being an aficionado of big games such as Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic and other similar titles, I have a bunch of them unfinished for which I've still invested 15 or 20 hours and I'd like to avoid losing my saves when transferring over to the new device. I know some apps use iCloud for game saves but it's surely not the majority, and some Googling lead me to some old tutorials such as this one from 2012 using iExplorer, but I was wondering if there was an easier way to clone up all the data to the new device. Surely, Apple cannot make it such a hard thing to give them more money, right ?
If you buy a new ipad you'll probably have the latest OS on it I'm on ios 8.2 as ios 8.3 locked down being able to use things like iExplorer etc. I love to add different roms to the emulators i've got on my machine, so if i had upgraded to 8.3 it would have stopped all of that Say it everytime but i'm surprised when people here instantly upgrade to the latest OS and then 'surprise surprise' moan when things have changed or games dont work. Crazy So i doubt you'll be able to transfer saves manually, must be iCloud only Saying that if you're backing up your data and then restoring it on a new device it'll save the data anyway wont it ? I've put 20 seasons into a football game i play often, when i got my new phone all the data was saved when i restored my new device using my last save. Same for some other games, double check but i'm sure all your data/saved games from your old device will simply be installed on the new one
Since it's going to be your own new device, you can use itunes backup to save everything, and setup the new device with the restore option. You can double up on security by making sure the apps in the old device are updated to the latest version, and the apps are ran at least once first (this updates the save file to its latest compatibility) before backing up and restoring.
You can set up a new iDevice from an iCloud or iTunes backup of an old device. You'll be given the option during setup. If you're using iTunes backup, make sure you have it set to backup the apps as well as your data. Otherwise it'll restore your save data but you'll have to redownload every app manually. If you're using iCloud, I recommend taking screenshots of the apps on each page. I usually find that using iCloud fails to re-download a couple of my apps for some reason. The save data's still restored and it'll be there waiting if you manually redownload the app within a day or two, so screenshots help you work out what apps are missing. Edit: note this is the iCloud device backup which works for all apps, not iCloud save data syncing which has to be implemented by devs .
