Restore iPad Mini from iPad but no apps, movies, music appearing

My wife got a new iPad Mini for Christmas to replace her old iPad 1. I thought the easiest thing to do would be to take a backup of the old iPad and move it to the new iPad Mini.

When doing this, iTunes asked if I wanted to update to iOS 6.02. I said I did. And I think that's where the problem started, because afterwards none of her apps or media appeared on the new iPad.

So I tried the Restore From Backup again. Still no apps.

What was appearing was her wallpaper and her shortcuts, but not the apps themselves.

I reconnected the old iPad and took another backup, then tried to do another Restore. Same result.

Time to hit Google. I found a post which seemed to talk through the issue. Again the user asking the question had also updated their iOS during the install. The guy answering talked though a solution, but as I read the subsequent posts the apps still hadn't restored. Post can be found here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4484316?start=0&tstart=0

I tried it anyway, and guess what, no apps. Not surprised, but I thought it was worth a go.

I remembered experimenting before with a corrupted backup that refused to back up properly and found that encrypting the backup forced it to do a full backup that made it work again. So I re-backed up the iPad 1 with encryption. This has the added benefit of backing up the passwords for the WiFi and email and so on.

I restored that to the iPad Mini. No apps.

I threw in the towel, and said to my wife that we had lost all her apps and their saved state. Perhaps it was an iPad 1 to iPad Mini thing...

Anyway, things weren't as bad as they seemed. When we started to manually load the apps on to the iPad, via iTunes, some of the saved state data came back. Kindle remembered her account details, her travel app remembered her packing lists. Some apps didn't, like the Olympics app didn't know about all the events she had saved, but they were definitely in the minority. Most of her apps remembered her settings and saved data.

So, to conclude, it might be an iPad 1 to iPad Mini issue. It might be that I updated the iOS. I don't know. However, the majority of apps, once restored manually, worked fine.

If you are attempting this migration, I would recommend not updating iOS until after everything has finished syncing. It's worth a try. Let me know if it works for you by posting a comment below, or if you have solved the issue - again - let me know.