When You Think You Have to Restore... You Proably Don't.

Last night I was messing with the system files in bed before going to sleep, and out of laziness, or unwillingness to get out of bed, I was using the VNC client on my iPod Touch to transfer files back to the Touch. Well apparently while trying to scroll across the screen, I dragged and moved a system folder into another, unknowing. I rebooted my iPod for the changes I had made to take affect, but the screen remained on that dreaded apple loading logo. I waited and waited, but the springboard never loaded. Well, I realized what I had done. I obviously couldn't SSH in to fix the mistake. But surprisingly I could see the Touch's directory through Total Commander. Though, however I tried, It wouldn't copy or move the directory back properly. I even tried copying the directory to my computer first, which also failed and gave me an error. After several attempts to fix the mistake, I finally decided I had no choice but to restore. But immediately after I launched iTunes to prepare the restore, it dawned on me that I had made a backup of my System folder to my computer, via ssh, ages ago. So one last attempt... and it worked. I transferred the MultiTouchSupport.framework directory, that I had previously backed up, through Total Commander, and my iPod immediately gave me that "loading to springboard" chirp, and all worked well.

Moral of the story... Make a backup of your iPod Touch/iPhone, and realize that there's probably another way of fixing a bricked Touch without having to restore. Because really, what a pain in the ass it would be to have to reconfigure Apache/PHP/Safari/Download Plug-in/etc, etc.