Can I keep my BARD books while upgrading to iOS 8?

If you restore which I recomend then no you canot. what I do is often have a bard back up folder with just my books I have in zip format on my desk top and I transfer those via itunes share. Ifyou don't want to restore as new then you can keep your books.

If I update over the air, does it keep everything intact, or does it, in effect, do a full wipe, upgrade the OS, then restore from iCloud?

Hello Jason,

In past Over-the-Air updates, all content is kept in tact on the user's device...and I don't think iOS 8 will be any different. However, it is good to have a full and complete backup of your device before doing any updates, just in case.

It does what you would do if you were downoading a delta update, that is only downloads what it needs, installed the update overtop of the older os reboots the phone and it's done.

@michael Thanks for your reply. I was hoping that's what it did. However, I'm still wondering if there's any known way to backup BARD books from your device, in the event that you're upgrading phones, or in case yours breaks/gets lost/stolen/etc.

To backup your Bard books, save them to your computer through file sharing section of ITunes. Then, if you have to put them back on your phone, you don't have to go download them againe. All you would have to do to restore them is send them back to your phone from the file sharing section of ITunes.

iTunes file sharing doesn't seem to allow the transfer of BARD books to PCs or Macs. However, it is possible to use iTunes file sharing to get books into the app if they are downloaded onto a PC or Mac first. Also, for reasons unknown to me, BARD books don't seem to be backed up with the rest of the device's settings and content in iTunes backups. It also doesn't seem possible to have BARD books sync to other iOS devices through iCloud.

Actually that won't work. If you navigate to the file sharing section the table is empty in th bard docs section Trust me I've done this mulitple times since last year.

I suspect the fact that, once downloaded, books do not appear in the docs section under the BARD app on iTunes is deliberate. while it makes it a pain for us dedicated and law-abiding BARD users, it is a measure to control to some extent distribution of BARD books. Again, this only a suspicion; I have no "in" with NLS on this.

It is my experience that if you just do an over-the-air iOS update and don't deliberately restore from backup, your BARD app data will remain intact. Restore from a backup, though, and you'll lose BARD app content because only settings -- not content -- are backed up.

Whether backing up apps also backs up app data is on a per-app basis.

If you import your books to your device via sharing apps in itunes, they do transfer if you do a computer update. I recommend if you can, do an update to ios 8 and immediately perform a restore from your computer if you can for a cleaner experience. then, once everything is te way you want it, delete all back ups and back up the device.

You should be able to, I had about 11 books loaded when I upgraded and they were still there after the upgrade.

Considering the number of major problems being reported with IOS8, I'd hold off on upgrading, if I were you.

BARD books are not backed up in iTunes with the rest of the device's settings and data. Therefore, wiping the device after updating to iOS 8 will cause the books to be deleted. I successfully updated to iOS 8 with my BARD books in tact, and have had no major issues with the BARD app thus far. However, as previously stated, if there are any known iOS 8 bugs which you can't deal with, then stay away from the update for a while untill the bugs are fixed.

"I suspect the fact that, once downloaded, books do not appear in the docs section under the BARD app on iTunes is deliberate. while it makes it a pain for us dedicated and law-abiding BARD users, it is a measure to control to some extent distribution of BARD books. Again, this only a suspicion; I have no "in" with NLS on this."

you are very modest indeed, for the design philosophy is very easy to see.

as for books not included in backup, it actually makes sense. you really don't need to backup many gigabytes of books when you can always download them again. for most books like fictions, you only listen to it once anyway...unless of course you have any reason to fear that you'll lose your NLS membership for some reason, then you'd better keep the books on your phone.