Re-booting your iPhone or iPod is the first thing you want to do if your devise freezes up or one of your apps goes haywire. Recently, the compass on my iPhone got stuck or frozen at 0 degrees North. No matter what I did with the configurations within the app, the compass stayed stuck at zero degrees North until I hit on the idea of re-booting my iPhone and miraculously the compass began working again. So if you ever find yourself having trouble with an iPhone app or with the phone itself freezing up, re-booting the phone is the first thing you might want to try.

Re-booting or re-setting your iPhone or iPod is not to be confused with simply turning your phone off and then back on again. To turn an iPhone off, you simply push and hold the sleep/wake button on the top of the phone until you see the "slide to power off" bar. Once that bar appears you can slid it to turn off the phone or tap "Cancel" to keep the iPhone turned on. To turn the phone back on, push and hold the same button. But that's not the same as re-booting the phone.

Your iPhone is a computer no less than the one setting on your desk at home or at work and like any computer you can turn it off (put it into sleep-mode) or re-boot it. We all know that ever now and then computers need to be re-booted and so it is with our hand-held devices.

To re-boot (re-set) your iPhone do this: Make sure your phone has at least 50% battery charge before you push and hold the sleep/wake button and the Home button (the big button on the bottom of the iPhone) at the same time. You keep holding these two buttons down until the screen goes black. The red power-off slider may appear but keep on holding those two buttons until you see the white Apple logo. Now you can turn loose of those buttons because your phone is re-booting. It may take a while to happen but eventually the phone will come back on and hopefully whatever problems you were having will have been resolved. An iPhone re-boot (re-set) will not normally remove or delete any data or settings for the phone or settings for any installed apps.

As I said before, re-booting your iPhone is not the same as simply turning it off and on. Nor should re-booting your iPhone be confused with Restoring your iPhone. Restoring an iPhone is the A-bomb or nuclear approach to problem solving. Restoring an iPhone will erase any and all information placed on the phone after it came out of the factory's box. That means all of the apps you placed on it will be gone after a Restore. Restoring the phone will erase all of your Contacts. All of the music and videos stored on your phone will be gone after a Restore.

If you had the foresight to back-up your files and information to iTunes or iCloud regaining all that info on your newly restored iPhone will be an option. I'll be talking about backing-up your iPhone further down this page. There may be times when restoring your phone is the only way to fix it but, re-booting should always be your first choice because that way you don't loose any information or files.

But if you want to go the A-bomb route and Restore your iPhone here's how to do that:

But remember! If you run into problems with your iPhone or iPod, try re-booting it before resorting to restoring it.

As we talked about in the passages above, just turning your iPhone or other Device off and on or even re-booting (re-setting) it isn't likely to cause you to loose files, information and/or apps but if you ever have to go the nuclear option and restore your iPhone you're going to loose everything and you're going to wish that you had had the foresight to have backed up all of your precious music and photos at the very least. So, lets talk a little bit about how to back-up the stuff on your iPhone, iPad and/or iPod using Apple's iCloud.

First, you must set up an iCloud account if you don't already have one. Here's how to set up iCloud on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad if you don't already have that done.

Once you have iCloud set up, get on your iPhone and go to Settings > iCloud > Backup & Storage on your phone or other iOS device and enable iCloud Back-up. In order for iCloud back-up to work you must insure the iPhone is in these three states:

Sign in to iCloud and choose Restore from a Backup in the Setup Assistant. Then choose “Restore from iCloud Backup” and enter your iCloud account and password. This is the email address associated with your Apple account and the password you use to download music and apps. You'll then see the three most recent back-up your phone or iDevice has made so choose the one you want.

Once the restoring process begins and iCloud begins downloading all of your music, videos, pics and apps to your phone, you maybe prompted from time to time to enter passwords for all the accounts you have enabled on your phone. So think of all the passwords you may need (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and be sure to have those handy. Apps are downloaded last and a progress bar will appear under each app. You can prioritize the restoring of one app as apposed to all others by tapping on it.

If you have iTunes installed on your PC or Mac and of course we all do, you can use iTunes to back-up your iPhone, iPod and iPad instead of iCloud.

Anytime you Sync your iPhone with iTunes it will automatically back-up your phone unless you're already using iCloud for your back-up and then it won't back your device up unless you Right-click (or Control-click on the Mac) your phone or other iDevice in iTunes under Devices and choose Back Up. If you decide to go with this manual method of backing up your iPhone on iTunes, you'll need to follow these steps.

Pull up iTunes on the computer you used to make the back-ups with and dock your iPhone, iPad or iPod to that computer using the docking USB connector that came with your device. (You know of course, that your iPhone re-charger is also your iPhone docking deice.) Right-click (or Control-click) your iphone or other iDevice and choose Restore from Backup.

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