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Level 1

9 points

iphone 3.0 Update + Slow Backup Process - Why Design the Backup like that??

Hi All,

I'm hoping one of Apple's staff will respond to this post. I'm sorry it is long and rambling, but the interesting stuff is at the bottom, so stay with me...please. And yes I'm a bit frustrated because my lovely iPhone has now been tied up for 9+ hours... not a good user experience.

This post is really about the backup process itunes initiates whenever I attempt to sync my iphone. I've never yet seen itunes get to the end of the backup. After the first 6 hours I get board and stop the process. iTunes is installed on Vista 64.

Well last night I downloaded Itunes 3.0 update and kicked off the upgrade process in iTunes. All was well (and at the time of writing I guess still is). The backup kicked off at 21:54 on 17 June. It is now 8:11 on 18 June and the backup is still going. The progress bar is still increasing (no x available to cancel) and I've the folder location in open in Windows Explorer. Last time I looked the backup folder contained some 21,000+ files. 1st file plist.status was written at 21:54. iTunes backup is still posting files to this folder!!!

Using some pretty basic Windows Tools to see what was going on I found out the following.

Apple backup uses 3 processes, one a Windows Service called AppleMobileDeviceService.exe. Another process called AppleMobileDeviceHelper.exe and AppleMobileBackup.exe. They are all network enabled. AppleMobileDeviceService is the hub and listens on port 27015. It 'talks' to the other two services on various & variable port range in the TCP/IP stack.

Using Windows Performance Monitor I can see that the TCP conversation going on between AppleMobileDeviceService & AppleMobileBackup is running at between 9,000,000 Bytes a Minute (min) and 14,000,000 Bytes a Minute (max). That is 1.2 Megabits per Second (min) & 1.86 Megabits per Second (max). That too me is very slow when the USB 2.0 interface its connected to has a capacity of up to 480Mbits per second.

It occurs to me that the methodolgy Apple's Devs have chosen for the backup process appears to be incredibly flawed.

I can't test whether the backup is also using compression, although I hope so because of the 21,000+ files (and climbing) in the backup folder to date they only add up to 200MBytes. My iPhone has 7 of its 8GBytes used, so I could be in for a very long haul before I get my updated iPhone 3.0 software.

Apple, please this isn't a dig, I know I've got Windows on the desk (its my day job)but I love my iPhone and AppleTV.

Can you ask your Devs to explain why they chose to use such a slow methodology to underpin the iPhone backup service. Or, is it that the potential high speed backup that is possibel over TCP/IP is just very broken?

Lastly, when is Apple going to fix this, because this backup thing is very broken and giving your customers an incredibly poor user experience.

Anyway, hope this was a little bit informative for those suffering the same trying to get their iPhone upgraded to 3.0.

Thanks

Pete.

handcrafted+dell, w7+vista+2008

Posted on Jun 18, 2009 12:41 AM

80 replies

w7ox

Level 4

2,407 points

Jun 18, 2009 3:32 PM in response to Madelline

Not a problem here .. but I happened to have only 12 images in the iPhone at the time I did the 3.0 upgrade.

Phil

Judy N

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 3:35 PM in response to kayjh

I have a MacBook (OS X 10.5.7) and it is taking forever, too. I used to take around 30 seconds and now it has been 1-1/2 hours and it's still going. From what I am reading, I may still have hours to go.

fisakov

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 5:17 PM in response to Madelline

The necessity to back up the photos is hardly an excuse for 10+ hours ⚠ required for backup to finish (if ever). The folder on my mac where backups are saved has 12000+ files that occupy whooping 160 MB. What is this? How is it possible that copying 160 MB from iPhone takes so much time? And why so many files?

As per your proposal, I just imported all my photos from the camera roll (about 120MB) and deleted them from the iPhone. I notice no change in backup speed. From my perspective, all this is a clear indication there's something wrong with how backup is implemented in iTunes.

fisakov

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 5:23 PM in response to fisakov

I must add, it seems that the problems with the backup speed started even before 3.0 rollout, when the iTunes was updated to 8.2. But at that time (with the 2.2 FW) it was still bearable. Cerainly less than an hour.

Jun 18, 2009 5:32 PM in response to Madelline

Well, it's been over 90 minutes since I started the latest backup...

I used iPhoto to pull and delete all the photos of my Camera Roll, and then went into iTunes and purged the old incomplete backup. Therefore, I was/am trying to get a full backup timing done.

I've been sitting at the 20% mark for about 45 minutes, and I think I'm giving up on this for today.

Grrrr,

Scott

Jun 18, 2009 5:45 PM in response to fisakov

Not making excuses. I don't like it either but it's helped a lot of our customers. Simply forwarding information. Sorry it didn't help you.

Jun 18, 2009 6:07 PM in response to tomagion

Hmmm.

Followed the guide at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3603 all photos removed from iPhone's camera roll. Backup still very, very slow. It does seem marginally quicker, but I'm talking an African racing snail vs a garden variety snail.

Ah well, just have to sit it out.

Jun 18, 2009 6:17 PM in response to tomagion

I've only got 13 pictures on my camera roll. I would hope that is not why I've been sitting at about 90% backup complete for over 2 hours now. And just to get to that 90% took about 45 minutes.

I ran fs_usage just to make sure the backup was still alive. It is, but barely. the applemobilebackup process is doing one write() every now and then (on a good backup write() is called 1000s of times in rapid fire). It's a snooze fest.. And sure enough my percent complete bar has just now moved about 1/32 of an inch.

What's really frustrating is putting this in perspective. A 200GB carbon copy clone of my entire system takes less time than this.

Jun 18, 2009 6:22 PM in response to Romulox2000

It seems to be helping a lot of people and not having an effect on just as many! We've already escalated this to our engineering department and are already working on it! That's definitely a problem. I'll come back if I get any updates!

TyRey

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 6:35 PM in response to tomagion

I am also seeing this problem too.

iPhone OS 3.0
Windows Vista Business
No pictures on my iphone.
Backup time = approximately an hour and a half

Jun 18, 2009 6:54 PM in response to tomagion

The solution is to take the pain, the hit, and start over. I've not found anything at all to solve this issue and I was Googling like an addict on this issue. I was clocking the thermometer bar in iTunes during backup after installing 3.0 at 2 pixels per 50 minutes. So, after an entire night, it was 25% complete. I looked in the backup folder (~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/) and there were 10,000 files and counting. After redoing the whole bloody thing like I just got it, I'm at 663 files. And backing up takes about 55 seconds.

TyRey

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 7:00 PM in response to MrLuxuryYacht

Can you be very specific on the steps you took.

Thanks man!

Jun 18, 2009 7:18 PM in response to TyRey

I cried. Had a few preliminary sips of my best scotch. Took screen shots of some key settings on the iPhone, including the way I had my apps laid out. And deleted the backup from that folder on the desktop. Then I cancelled the sync, clicked RESTORE from the SUMMARY tab, and waited. My backup was, I'm guessing, completely corrupted, and not even complete anyway, so I didn't choose to restore from it at any point in the process. It went through its churnings and then restarted the iPhone. And then I just went through each tab, one by one. I did the INFO first, then clicked on the iPhone icon in the left bar with a right click to instigate BACKUP. Then I did the next tab. And the next one, etc. I didn't want to have to rethink too much how I set laid out the apps, so I did one page at a time, all the while doing some RETHINKING about the apps I have and SOME rethinking about how they might relate better (I have each row of 4 relate to each other in some way).

fisakov

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2009 7:48 PM in response to fisakov

Solved!

It seems the extremely long backup times are caused by corrupt (?) or wrongly formatted data left on the device by some apps. I'm talking about caches and the like.

So, I looked through my installed apps and deleted those, which were keeping lots of caches: maps, data dowloaded from the web etc. Then restarted the iPhone, deleted all the files in the backup directory on the mac -- and bingo! Backup took just a few minutes. What a relief!

Hope this helps.

vectoria

Level 1

45 points

Jun 18, 2009 8:02 PM in response to bmochi

Bmochi, thank you so much for your post!
Couldn't get through backup, but I followed your workaround and Finally had success in getting 3.0...
You were really helpful!

iphone 3.0 Update + Slow Backup Process - Why Design the Backup like that??