I am learning more and more by the day, I love this Ipad2, never had one before.

At the moment my Ipad2 is fully synced with my PC and a backup recovery file is saved on the PC.

My wife having seen my Ipad has bought herself a new one from the Apple store.

Big Question??
If I connect her untouched Ipad to my PC and click Restore in the Summary tab, will Itunes download my backup file to her machine so I end up with two identical Ipads?

The same question applies if I were to upgrade my Ipad with a 3G model, is this the way to duplicate all my settings, movies, files etc onto the new 3g ?

If I simply sync the new machine with my PC, will this achieve the same effect or will Itunes back up a new machine with nothing on it to as my Itunes back up file?.

I don't want to end up in a situation where I lose any data from my Itunes back up file.

Sorry if this is not well explained, I have one PC and two ipads in the house. I would like to keep both Ipads perfectly in sync with each other using the one PC.

Regards
Michael

One of our frequent and most experienced posters, twerppoet, posted this advice on this topic

"In iTunes, with your iPad connected, choose you iPad under devices.

Right click on the iPad and do a Backup.

Right click on the iPad and choose Transfer Purchases.

Explore iTunes on the computer and make sure all your media and apps are there.

That will do most of what you need. To be on the safe side, go through any of your apps that store or create documents and make sure you email, or otherwise save them to the computer. Be sure to include the Saved Pictures album in iPhotos.

When you get your new iPad sync it to same account and computer. Right click on the device and choose Restore from Backup. I'm not completely sure of the right sequence in the restore procedure, so you might want to grab the iPad User's Guide. But as long as you did the first part with the old iPad you should bje able to fumble you're way to a complete recovery of all your stuff.

Before you send back your iPad, be sure to Restore it from the main device screen. This will remove all your personal data and set it to the same state you received it in."

Obviously, you might want to omit the last paragraph.

Tim

As long as you are able to synchronize your iPad data, you would be able to perform the data transfer from your iPad to PC and vice versa via the iTunes. I should teel you that sometimes there is some kind of synchronisation problem between the iTunes and iPad while transferring the data. So you need to make sure that you have backed up the data before transferring it.

While pressing and holding the Home button, reconnect the USB cable to iPad. When you reconnect the USB cable, iPad should power on.
Continue holding the Home button until you see the "Connect to iTunes" screen. When this screen appears you can release the Home button.
If necessary, open iTunes. You should see the recovery mode alert that iTunes has detected an iPad in recovery mode.
Use iTunes to restore iPad.

As this is a two-year old thread and the OP has moved on (or been helped long ago), this thread is now closed. Thanks for your understanding.

Marilyn