Backup of iPhone takes around 2 hours!

I did not go back to 7.7 and after all this headache I am not sure iTunes was the culprit. I believe it was a few apps that were causing issues with a backup and therefore sync and restore processes.

iTunes even "called out" Flashlight during all this for me with an error. After that I was able to get my iPhone to restore by choosing Setup as New Phone. I am not sure if this is an option for you as I don't know what you would lose. Just in case you don't know, you can redownload all of your apps (paid and free) for free so don't be afraid of losing apps. Also, you can always resync music and photos. I think the only data you would lose would be say information you have input into an app i.e. accounts/passwords in an app like eWallet.

After choosing Setup as New Phone the sync/restore/backup functions have worked for me. I do cancel the backup and only do it every once and while just out of lack of trust.

I just don't think you can get out of that loop unless you Setup as New. Hopefully you don't lose much data. I would recommend (until firmware gets better) taking a look at what apps you REALLY want and need and removing everything else as it is hard to tell which one of them is buggy.

I'm having many of the same problems as others (ridiculously long backup time, some things not syncing, and iphone sync icon continuing to spin while the iphone itself doesn't seem to be actually syncing).

However, I've done a few things that seemed to have helped:
1. You can just click the 'x' to close when backup starts, either that or use the simple one-click app to enable/disable backup for iTunes (get it here: http://www.eidac.de/?p=50)

2. I noticed one time that sync cancelled when installing an app --oddly enough it was an app I had checked out called 'Bible'. I deleted that from my iTunes app list, and that seems to have helped? Maybe certain other apps are causing similar problems, or maybe it was a coincidence.

3. I have DLed to 7.7.1, but not sure if that helped as I had to do the above still.


The result...backup now skips, sync is going farther (currently it is finally removing the many apps I deleted via iTunes, though it is taking a loooong time...shouldn't it just be a quick delete?), and we'll see whether it finally sync podcasts and photos and new apps (thats where it had stopeed before).
...

I'm having the same problem. People might say, "Well, maybe you have some large apps on there." But hey, my iPhone only has 8GB total space on it. Does the backup need to be more than a straight copy of the content of the iPhone, or an image copy? Over USB 2.0, that certainly shouldn't be taking 2 hours. There must be something totally unnecessary going on during the process. Hopefully 2.1 will have some major fixing. On second thought, I'll take stability in 2.1 -- and wait for 2.2 to get the backup part working right.

ManateeMac wrote:
On second thought, I'll take stability in 2.1 -- and wait for 2.2 to get the backup part working right.

I'll take both stability and a working backup in firmware 2.1. It's insane that this doesn't work right now. Apple needs to get it right and do it now.

If you want to you can disable backups until a fix comes along. Just type "defaults write com.apple.itunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool YES" in terminal.

I think its obvious how to re-enable.

I can confirm two things:

1. If I get a call and the backup gets canceled, things get corrupted and the next backup is over two hours.

2. Backups seem to be incremental if there is no corruption.

A look inside
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/(DEVICE ID/HASH FOLDER NAME)
shows me that files in there were modified across three different dates.

The first date (7/26/08) was a normal, 14-minute backup (if you can call that "normal"). -- 36 files
The second date is yesterday, where the backup was over two hours (I received a phone call during sync and it canceled the backup, apparently corrupting things). -- 5,135 files
The third date is today, where the backup was under 15-minutes. -- 412 files

So, yesterday there were more files backed up. I found that the files (file extension is .mdbackup) were created in the backup folder at a rate of 1.54 files per second. This is very slow. It's not just a simple copy of files from the iPhone. These backup files are created from files on the iPhone, it seems. Obviously, there could be something else going on that I have no idea about, and the actual files could be copied to another location as well, which would explain the slow backup times (two processes occurring at the same time), but I have no idea, so it would only be speculation to assume this.

*So, keep this in mind: Put your iPhone into Airplane mode when you sync it. This will, at least, prevent anyone from calling you while the sync is occurring.*

(I'm posting this in a few threads, since I've been participating in similar threads for the same issue.)

Message was edited by: Dennis Metzcher

Message was edited by: Dennis Metzcher

I have the same adobe problem. It pops up everytime we plug in our iphones. Irritating, and I don't know how to disable that either. Any ideas anyone?

There is no 'easy' answer that i have found, but i think you can work around the backup bit whilst still syncing other stuff by turning off the automatic syncing and then if you make a change to a particular category of settings in iTunes, you get the option to "Apply" the setting which will sync only that portion of data.

IE, if you want to Sync only your apps, you can click on your iPhone in iTunes and then go to the applications tab and change a setting there, then it will sync the new settings and update your apps as well.

It's a pretty messy way to do business, but when you just wanna pop a couple of new songs on your phone on before you head out to the gym, it saves minutes/hours of backing up.

- cloud9ine

My backup time went down from 3 hrs to 2hrs 10min after installing 2.0.1 but that's still unacceptable. I've got a backup drive and although it slower when I backup via Norton 360, it's still faster than iTunes even though there's far more data going to my external drive.

DaleKKiller wrote:
My backup time went down from 3 hrs to 2hrs 10min after installing 2.0.1 but that's still unacceptable. I've got a backup drive and although it slower when I backup via Norton 360, it's still faster than iTunes even though there's far more data going to my external drive.

The backup isn't a simple file copy. Backup files are created from the files on your device. The extension is .mdbackup.

That still doesn't make the length of time it takes to create a backup acceptable, but it explains it a little. I think your backup is corrupted each time, and a full backup is being created, requiring all backup files to be written again each time you sync. My backups take less than 10-minutes now, and are incremental backups, unless they become corrupted (by canceling the backup or receiving a phone call while backing up), in which case the full process runs the next time and takes over 2-hours.

So I think the issue is this: Some users are seeing all their backups become corrupted. Other users are not seeing this, in which case the backups run quickly. It seems that getting backups down to less than 5-minutes requires that the apps installed not be too large (or too many), since this will increase the time regardless of corruption.

I was seeing all my backups corrupt (2+ hours to back up my device). After I updated to iTunes 7.7.1, I saw less corruption, but I can still force corruption by canceling the backup itself. For those that haven't seen positive results with iTunes 7.7.1, I have no idea what is going on. Without Apple getting involved and actually *talking to us*, we'll never know, and something tells me that we'll never know. They'll probably just "fix" it at some point and tell us we were all crazy...or...worse, ignore us.

Thanks for that information Dennis. I deleted the backup listed for my 3G iphone in preferences and my last sync took only half an hour including backing up which is the best I've had in a long time.

If you paid for an app, Apple has recorded it and you won't have to pay for it again. Just re-download the app, and when it tries to purchase, the record will show you have already been charged for that software and won't re-charge you. It should simply prompt you to re-download the software.

DaleKKiller wrote:
Thanks for that information Dennis. I deleted the backup listed for my 3G iphone in preferences and my last sync took only half an hour including backing up which is the best I've had in a long time.

That's good to know. I refused to delete any backups because I read in the comments of one of the first blog posts to suggest this that it caused more problems. Were you running iTunes 7.7.1 when you deleted the backup and backed up from scratch?