Thanks Derick. My iPad is about 6 years old, an iPad2 with software 12.4.
This is exclusively an issue with the iOS 13. Anyone using an older more stable OS should be perfectly fine. Anyone that can roll back their device and wait to upgrade should. I’m not upgrading my phone until Apple sorts out more bugs—from what I’ve seen on my seldom used iPad, it’s still beta quality in general.
It’s not so much the cost that concerns me as a synch going haywire and losing my project (I read of someone losing a project in a botched synch and then somehow it backed up and he (reckons) he lost 4 years work. It’d ruin your day, wouldn’t it? (I’ll save my project somewhere safe first).
The moral of these stories shouldn’t be to avoid using useful technology, but to never trust any technology whatsoever to protect your work. That is entirely up to you—make backups, always! One should even be backing up their device with iTunes regularly (and in turn the computer running iTunes should be constantly backed up), you are living on the edge if you don’t! Stuff like this really shouldn’t happen, but when it does, it really should never be catastrophic. It should be at most a half hour of recovery, but more optimally, the 30 seconds it takes to locate the previous zip and unzip it.
That said, I don’t know anything about “sync going haywire”. I suppose the closest I’ve heard to anything like that were not cases of the tech actually malfunctioning, but it taking instruction very literally and doing something unintended (in a human sense). E.g. a person is on the road for a month with their device, comes home and fires up the Mac to start working on their project before oops, realising its the old version, and in a panic hits the sync button on their iPad. They’ve just told the software that they want to overwrite the month of work they did with the technically newer copy on the Mac. We get one or two stories like this every year, but of course only from those that don’t make backups. The ones that make backups realise they made a mistake and fix it in 30 seconds.