Newsroom Update

Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available in Canada. Learn more >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

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

Jun 19, 2009 11:05 PM in response to tomagion

Hello All,

I'd really like to know how to solve this long backup issue. After updating to 3.0 my backup process doesn't seem to want to complete. Last night I left the iPhone syncing for 13 hours until I had to cancel it because I needed the phone. The progress bar in iTunes got about 80% and the backup folder ended up to be 1.52 GB containing 30,266 files.

I don't want to restore my iPhone and start again as I have apps with data that I want to retain (audio recordings and such).

Regards
Steve

sbessel

Level 1

0 points

Jun 20, 2009 12:54 AM in response to fisakov

After spending from 10:00a till almost midnight trying to backup my 3g, and waiting 4+ hours at a time, and endless internet searches I gave up and found the answers myself to my slow backups.

It is not a single ‘click this’ fix. What I found was it was the applications data that was taking so long and creating so many backup files, at one point I had over 30,000 files, and I was still not completely backed up.

The funny thing is when I did the 3.0 update I didn’t backup, I let the update do it and it was very fast… so I know Apple knows how to do it right.
My offending apps were:
AppSniper, its icon cache was a killer, I had a couple of RSS news readers and they saved a ton of data, as well as USA today, AP Mobile, Shazam, and probably a couple of others.
First I did was disable all the apps I knew didn’t store any data, or any data I needed. Do this by just unselecting the app in ITunes, it will remove it from your phone but keep it in iTunes, to put it back just check the box again, simple and painless.

Here is how I was able to find each offending app;
If you look in your C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup directory (XP only, Vista and Win7 will have to locate this themselves)

I killed all my current directories in there to start fresh. (you can rename the directories) this way iTunes will start with a fresh new directory.

Once you press backup it will create a new directory with a large number, inside it will start placing files, lots of files. There are really only 2 types we care about.

The .mdinfo and .mddata files. From what I can tell the .mdinfo is the info about the matching .mddata file.

While your backup is running wait for a point where the progress bar looks ‘stuck’, mine would stick many times and quick early in the process.

Then you use notepad or any text editor to view the last few .mdinfo files, at the end of the first line you should be able to decipher the application this data belongs to. It is usually ‘stuck’ at that point because there is a lot of files, so it shouldn’t take opening too many to see the offending application.

Here is an example of a picture I have stored: DCIM/100APPLE/.MISC/IMG_0079.
Here was an icon from the AppSniper icon cache (this was my worst offender)
nts/icon303821457sS3.0 _ AppDomain-com.manta.App

I found USA Today with a bunch as well as some RSS readers...

The it is up to you if you want or need that data, if you don’t stop the backup, remove the app from your iPhone in iTunes, sync and it will be gone from your iPhone but still in iTunes for later retrieval, then start the backup again and wait for the next stop. This process took me a total time (once I figured it out) of ~30 minutes, and then my backup only took 5 minutes.
Most of the ones I listed about I didn’t actually need any of that data, it was easily rebuilt by the app in seconds.

I hope this helps…

Scott

VSL.008

Level 1

20 points

Jun 20, 2009 1:28 AM in response to Madelline

Thanks, Madelline, good to know. I visited and saved the link. I will be deleting more photos now after loading to iPhotos.

Jun 20, 2009 5:40 AM in response to sbessel

Thanks sbessel, this was indeed the solution :o)

I too, had AppSnipper and some RSS apps. I deleted all the apps with non critical data, created a fresh backup in around 20 mins, reinstalled the apps I wanted back and now backups are under 5 mins :o) And the backup folder has only 1709 files in it and not the 30,000 plus that my failed backup folder had in it last night.

Thanks heaps!
Steve

Message was edited by: Steven Prince

hsisson

Level 1

0 points

Jun 20, 2009 7:11 AM in response to drensin

Interesting to read the discovery of the offending apps, but I had already done a complete restore, which indeed solved my problem. My only mistake was forgetting to take a screen shoot of my snipes (AppSniper). I guess they can't be that important if I can't remember any of them. I didn't add all my apps back, as I had quite a few on the iPhone that I never used. Total files in my backup folder currently is 1,059, at one point during the bad back up I was approaching 40K when I canceled the backup. Sounds like this is an issue for the individual app programers to address, with instruction from Apple. (Unless Apple can solve it themselves with an update to 3.0)

jynjyn

Level 1

0 points

Jun 20, 2009 7:34 AM in response to tomagion

A temporary solution will be deleting all your backups within iTunes.

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Devices

You won't lose anything as the phone's backup will create a new backup within iTunes. Only worry if you have to do a restore.

Jun 20, 2009 2:33 PM in response to sbessel

I have both USA Today and Appsniper. I checked Appsniper, and there is a way to clear out the icon cache in the program itself without having to remove the entire program:

Go into AppSniper,
click Settings
Clear icon cache.

I'm going to try to see if this works, or at least helps to decrease backup times. There are other options there too to reset the program, so that may also help if AppSniper's data is causing a problem.

Aschi

Level 1

9 points

Jun 20, 2009 2:51 PM in response to tomagion

After hours and hours of backup attempts lasting 5+ hours to reach50% I removed 3 apps which can download newspaper content for offline reading (20minutes, Blick, Stern). This solved the problem. Before, I had 44'000+ files in the backup directory at 50%! Now 1363 after complete backup!

Jun 20, 2009 2:57 PM in response to Aschi

I notice if you cancel a backup, those files remain in the backup folder. So, I have 30,000+ files in the backup folder, and they keep growing in numbers with additional backups...

I going to reset downloaded content data for any program I can find (without uninstalling the program), then rename the backup folder to backupold, create a new backup folder and then try a new backup.

Jun 20, 2009 4:27 PM in response to Albert Swearengen

It took me a while, I removed some other programs that I thought would cause a problem and reset a lot of programs but I still had a slow backup. I found the offending program was mBOX Mail (for Hotmail)

I even did a master reset and removed all my accounts in mBOX Mail and it still caused the backup to slow down. So I am not sure if it was a corrupt install, or just bad data in this program only.

Once I removed mBOX Mail, the backup was normal again.

I'm going to reinstall some of programs I removed one a time, and test, to confirm.

Jun 20, 2009 5:05 PM in response to Albert Swearengen

I was having the exact same problem and i removed mbox from my apps on the iphone then sync'd and it took about 2 minutes so it was this causing it to take 10-12 hours.

Jun 20, 2009 5:13 PM in response to Renne Stuart

Yes I believe it was mBOX too. I checked when I purchased mBOX, and it was in early April. The exact time when this problem started.

VSL.008

Level 1

20 points

Jun 20, 2009 7:04 PM in response to Albert Swearengen

My backup just took 15 minutes after removing AppSniper and Dictionaire (Dictionary). Normally, it took 2+ hours! Now 617 MB of apps remain. Also, I did not delete any photos. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Obviously, this is a huge time savings!

BTW, I never had mBox. I added AppSniper back, though, to see how things go the next time.

plasmo

Level 1

15 points

Jun 21, 2009 1:20 AM in response to drensin

Since upgrading to iPhone 3.0 on Saturday night (20 June), I have have not had a successful backup (with encrypton option on and off), the progress bar seems to stall at about 80% each time for 30-60 minutes until I receive a call or have to interrupt the backup. Same problem with my wife's iPhone 3G.

Using iPhone 3G 16GB, 70apps, 70 photos in camera roll, iMac, 10.5.7, iTunes 8.2.

I think this needs a software fix. I had a very similar problem when 2.0 was released, and it was only resolved after the iPhone software was updated. I am going to wait until the software is patched, life is too short.

dneuland

Level 1

29 points

Jun 22, 2009 9:49 AM in response to sbessel

Wow, that did the trick for me! My culprits were Cooliris and Stanza. Removed those and my backup went down to under 2 minutes from hours and hours. Also, my backup folder went from over 18000 items down to less than 2500 as iTunes cleared out the old incomplete backups. Sweet!

Thanks Scott!

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