Wanting my custom ringtone back, but how without erasing iPhone?

[Technique]

Yesterday i was running jailbroken iOS 5.1.1 & amongst other things i had a custom ringtone on there. It'd been that long that i'd forgotten how i even put it on there.

I updated to iOS 7 & i lost the ringtone off my phone which i'm now wanting to put back on but can't remember how.

I just tried plugging my phone in, opening iTunes, clicking the "tones" tab under my phone & Syncing selected tones.

I then get the message saying this is synced with another account (on my PC) & i can erase the entire phone if i want & sync with this library. Thing is there's so much i would end up losing.

So how do i get this ringtone on my phone?

[Shadrack]

Definitely an area of the most confusion (and frustration) surrounding iOS is how to properly sync it with another computer.

 

In my experience, Apple's warning message is a complete overstatement.  iTunes will only sync the content you check off should sync.  So if all that you do is check "ringtones", then all that it should erase are the ringtones on your phone that are not in iTunes.  Still, do that at your own risk. 

 

If you want to ensure that nothing gets dishevel, you will need to ensure you are logged into your account in iTunes and that all of your apps are downloaded in iTunes.  This shouldn't be necessary since Apps are "installed" instead of "sync'd", but Apple's warning messages are still extreme.

 

Best way to just get the ringtone on your phone is to email the file to yourself and then open it on your phone.

[Buttus]

yea, i was going to say just get the .mp3 or .wav or whatever and email it to yourself...

[Symal Taneous]

You can use a program called iExplorer to browse your phone's contents and copy the ringtones to your hard drive and reimport them to iTunes.

 

I actually had this issue this morning, I had a few tones that I had on my phone from another computer, when I went sync my phone with my computer this morning, I got the same message. I used iExplorer to copy the tones to my hard drive and reimported them back to iTunes and that did the trick.

[Sikh]

There's an option called "manually manage music and video". Its on the summary page and not confusing at all. Apple provides convenience which is automatic syncing. But for those of us who don't want that can look around and see there's an option to manually manage the content on the phone.

I've been using this option since iTunes 7 and my iPod classic / 5th gen. You can hook up your phone with any computer after checking this option and copt all the music you want. All of the ringtones, video whatever. You have full control to drag and drop whatever you wish from whatever computer to your phone.