I have no idea how my email ended up in this thread as I started a new email, I didn’t reply to an old one 
I also haven’t gotten an email from Tidbits since Nov 27.
The phone is still working. I ended up with nearly 400 songs downloaded, yet iTunes says I’ve only purchased 250. There seems to be a fair number of duplicates, one with and album cover photo and one that is blank.
I’m still perplexed about the photos. They are still downloading and I’m guessing I’ll get them all back onto the phone. The phone first showed me the structure of my albums and the dates of the photos and is now filling them all in. Long process.
I have to come up with a better way to manage my phone pix. I used to use iView Media Pro to download them to my computer and then back them up, but that stopped working in an OS update. I know I can use Photos, but the way it stores them in the finder is completely convoluted. I just want to put them in one folder called “iPhone Pix”. So instead I randomly use AirDrop to send them over but it can be tedious.