Clean off and restore older iPad

TimRichards

Well-Known Member
Hi all, I've been using my wife's old iPad on our boat to run the Navionics chart-plotter Navigation program. Even the old iPad works much easier than my newish Lawrance depth sounder.
Anyway I have the notion to erase most of what's on her old iPad and do a backup-restore which I have heard will give it a little speedier response. Also I'm leaving it on the boat sometimes in a watertight bag and wish to delete all my wife's old data.
Can I just shut off her iCloud? How then to erase all her pictures, music, contacts, etc?

After cleaning it off, I will want to leave Navionics (or add) a very few boating specific aps, such as Shipfinder, FishingBC, etc. - so I guess do I need to sign in with my own iCloud account? Will signing in with my account delete all her stuff? The Navionics version that is on her old iPad has been discontinued, but it provides everything needed soI do not want to lose it... I cannot put all the stuff currently on MY iPad onto this old one, and I'm a little leery of signing in and having it blow a fuse when it sees how much is in my own iCloud backups. I guess I have some deeply buried bad memories of unexpected tradgedies!
Today I attached the old iPad to my computer and asked it to back it up, intending to do a backup then restore. It only took like five minutes to backup. It is a small capacity iPad, says it has 27.1 GB available, Model MD 367C\A. I think it was a 32GB machine? Now that I check, it has downloaded 9.3.6 to update a few things so I'll install that. That you for any guidance on this. Cheers, and Happy Thanksgiving.
 

chas_m

Well-Known Member
The best approach here, IMO, is to first do a backup to iCloud or a local Mac in order to make a full backup of the iPad as it is, then sign the iPad out of iCloud, Messages, and all other services she might be using (this does not erase anything she has in iCloud), and finally erase the machine entirely so that it goes back to factory settings. This can be done in the Preferences app (the location of this control varies depending on what iOS version you are running). Don't forget to remove the device from her Apple ID via appleid.apple.com (she needs to sign in to do this) from a web browser.

Once the machine is back to "out-of-the-box" condition, add your own iCloud/email/etc accounts, and download any apps you need (if you bought these apps under your own Apple ID from the App Store previously, you can re-download them for free of course). If the Navionics has been discontinued as you say, you'll need to find a replacement program (and I'm sure there must be one!).
 
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