Ibooks lost all contents after retore

[Treugene]

I have an old iPad 2 running IOS 9.3.5. As it has been performing poorly I followed advice provided by an apple thread I recently read which recommended a full backup of the iPad (I did it to a Win7 machine HDD) followed by a factory reset and a Restore.
Everything worked well except that all my books (pdf's and purchased DRM books) have now disappeared.
I tried to sync again but it did not help. Are these files to be found on my computer? If there a solution to this problem as some of the books are free technical books collected over time and not easily obtainable. I am also not good at using the iTunes app as I find it counter-intuitive. Any help will be appreciated

 

[scifan57]

The books and PDFs will be found in the books section of iTunes, if they were in iBooks on the iPad.
When your iPad is connected to itunes, the books section is in the upper half of the sidebar.

 

[Treugene]

Not sure I have it right - this is what I found - Is there a way to see what is contained in the backup files?

 

[J. A.]

No, that's not possible.

 

[scifan57]

Not sure I have it right - this is what I found - Is there a way to see what is contained in the backup files?
View attachment 76478

That screenshot shows what is currently on your device. Normally, if there were any books in your iTunes library, they would show under a books heading in the upper half of the sidebar under the library heading.

 

[Jupiter7]

If you go to Books on your iPad, you can go to the heading Books (with a little arrow underneath). Tap this and it will give you various options for display, but importantly at the bottom of the screen you will see an option to show or not All in iCloud. This is where you can see all the books you have bought and you can redownload those you want.

 

[Treugene]

Folks - I think I better explain further. My iBooks contained a lot of technical/scientific papers in pdf that I have collected over time which cannot be purchased from Apple stores. These papers all relate to my profession and are only obtainable from the authors themselves. I was under the impression that when you perform a backup it does exactly what it means in "normal" computer terminology. If these documents are permanently lost it will be very sad and I will seriously have to consider another more reliable platform for the future. Secondly I did not backup to the cloud, only to my computer as I see no reason that that action is flawed.
Any other suggestions will be appreciated?

 

[scifan57]

PDF books are normally contained in a backup and should not have have been deleted. They should appear in the books library on your computer.

 

[Jupiter7]

This is indeed very sad. Are you quite certain you were not signed in to Apple iCloud? If you were (and I think the backup option by default would be On) then silently, in the background whenever the device was plugged in and switched off, it would have been backing up.

In addition, if you had another iDevice, such as an iPhone (also signed in to the iCloud) or a Mac, you would be able to access your PDFs from there.

 

[Treugene]

Tried the iphone advice but no luck. Thanks for all the advice - I seem to be at a dead end.
Does anybody know if when performing a backup to Win 7 computer whether all ibooks content is also backed up to the computer ? If so, I would have imagines that retrieval would have been straight forward. If not, how stupid can the people at Apple be!
I am considering my options and am seriously considering migrating to an Android device to avoid this from occurring in future again.

 

[scifan57]

Hello there, my friend. Yes, all is well in my world.. The daffodils, Magnolia etc... Are all looking amazing in this spring sunshine. Cleared out my patio of leaves and tried to fix gazebo. May need new cover. It's looking a bit yugh.

All your iTunes content should have been backed up, including books and PDFs in iBooks. Also, when connecting to iTunes, if it detects items on your iPad that are not in the iTunes library on your computer, you should have seen a pop up telling you this and offering the chance to transfer the items to your iTunes library. If you don't transfer the items, they're erased from your device. That could explain why they were nowhere to be found.