Clean Slate: My Experience Hard Resetting 8.1 (chime in if you'd like)

[xandros9]

Ahoy,
I have a Lumia 920 as some may know. (AT&T US variant, flashed with the unbranded French ROM.)
I installed 8.1 Developer Preview hours after it went live. (I was also occupied setting up a new desktop so I wasn't completely bored while it worked.)

After the update, things felt slightly slower and that was to be expected for me at least. However battery life took a hit and my 920 seemed to run warm to hot often.
It dropped from the normal 16ish hours to approximately 10-11 ish. Not scientific, but obvious.

Having not hard reset since I got my paws on it with GDR2/Amber onboard and soft resets weren't doing it, I decided to take off and nuke the site from orbit. The only way to be sure. I was a bit afraid since there was bound to be something I forgot to save or whatever. (which turned out to be my recent copy of my Pok?mon game)

Erasing it was straightforward, it was restoring. I set things up and unlike/like others, I restored from a backup.
Here's what happened...
I could sign in with my MS account without the authenticator because my phone was the same one. (matched the phone number)
App data in most apps was not preserved. (I had to redo two-step authentication for some places)
Wi-Fi passwords went poof! (I do have Wi-Fi sense off though)
Battery life has returned to normal, I'm not feeling as much heat. Still gets warm at times.
When restoring, all my apps were redownloaded and installed automatically. My start screen was restored exactly as it was.
I had to reloginto my Google and Nokia account. I had to re-set my check-email frequency for Google but my third email was already set as I left it.
Some stuff like HERE had to be downloaded manually.
All my text messages were back like nothing had happened. Picked up and continued a convo from there.
6Snap/Snapchat does indeed store your contacts online. (thankfully)
Most settings were set, some Nokia one's had to be reset, no biggie though. Needed to redownload a keyboard pack I believe.
Logging back into Skype and other stuff was a pain.
Obviously music, camera roll and stuff was deleted.
Cortana did not work out of the box. I had to download the speech pack before Cortana was enabled.
Reenrolling in the Developer Preview program was smooth, looked like no unlock required to begin with.
The no-longer-available Gameboy emulators were gone, so I had to pick up the new ones.

Honestly, it turned out better than i expected. YMMV.

 

[anon(123856)]

Glad it went well. It sort of mimics my experience with hard resetting my 822 with 8.0. One weird thing I can add, a buddy of mine who also has an 822 lost his phone (didn't have Location on so he couldn't use find my phone), replaced it with another 822 and all went well except for texts. He got some of them back but was missing maybe 6 months worth. Then last weekend all the missing texts appeared out of nowhere! He wasn't sure what happened but was happy to have his texts back. I've done a couple of hard resets and never had any issues myself.

 

[VineRider]

Does it affect Xbox music when you do the hard reset? In other words do you have to reset in your Xbox music devices? I'm at the 4 device maximum so wondering about this.

 

[dgr_874]

I really enjoyed watching my homescreen layout and all my apps restored in about 10 mins after I did a hard rest last week. Very nice.

 

[Smort]

After a hard reset, I was impressed that little things like Bing Weather had me signed in, had my location correct and all my favorites in place. The next day, I saw my podcasts were all there! That was a very nice touch (not to mention a timesaver).