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

caa100

Level 1

11 points

Jun 22, 2009 11:00 AM in response to tomagion

Since upgrading to 3.0, I had never been able to finish a backup. After 2+ hours, it would still be only halfway, and so I would hit X and let it sync.

After reading the post from sbessel (thanks!) I got to thinking that maybe some of my apps that cache a lot of data were the problem. So I deleted some, and was able to complete a backup in less than half an hour. That's still long, but I am hopeful that it will be faster from now on.

Here is what I did:

1. On the Phone, deleted applications that I had recently used which cache a lot of data for offline use:

-- NY Times
-- BBC Reader
-- WallStreetJournal
-- ESPN ScoreCenter (cited as a problem in a similar thread)
-- NetNewsWire
-- Huffington Post

2. Renamed the backup folder on the PC
(on Windows XP, it is at:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup and the folder has a hexadecimal name.)

3. Sync

This worked. Backup took less than half an hour. I am now going to add the apps back in.

Very happy to have sort of resolved this without having to do a restore.

Thanks to all of you who posted on this, especially sbessel.

VSL.008

Level 1

20 points

Jun 22, 2009 11:09 AM in response to caa100

For his first post, Scott (sbessel) from Folsom, CA sure made an impact. Thanks, Scott. Kudos!

kgabor00

Level 1

4 points

Jun 23, 2009 1:47 AM in response to tomagion

Before 3.0 i delete few apps(no photos or anything), appsniper is not included(no clear cache)! After install 3.0, sync is ok, run few min, all things back the phone.
BUT i try the new backup and struck again 50-60%. Run all night (6-7hours) files 10k+.
So the backup problem is continued to not solved. Apple need to fix it!

caa100

Level 1

11 points

Jun 23, 2009 1:26 PM in response to caa100

A follow up to my post from yesterday:

I was happy to have things down to half an hour, but nervous about what I would find today. (iTunes only runs a backup the first time you sync each day.)

Plus, before syncing today, I added back most of the applications that I had deleted yesterday, and launched some of them so that they would cache some data.

So, this afternoon, I nervously placed my 3G in the dock, got out my stopwatch, and pressed sync. The result +(drum roll please)+...........

Today, the backup phase of the Sync operation took *1 minute and 21 seconds!*

Fabulous!

Of course, all this should not have been necessary. Clearly, Apple needs to look at this problem and fix it.

orthorim

Level 1

10 points

Jun 23, 2009 6:44 PM in response to tomagion

Thanks to the above posters - removing apps and Safari cache solved the issues for me.

I updated to 3.0 and immediately noticed that backups seemed to be very, very slow. Not just the first one, but every single one. Not as bad as others have reported but they went from a few seconds to ~45 minutes.

Here's what I did to resolve, following other's advice in this discussion. I don't know if all of these steps are required, but I didn't want to try this many times so I deleted everything I could find.
-Deleted all applications from my iPhone, unchecked sync applications. Don't worry your apps are safe, you will re-sync them later.
-Deleted all on-screen Safari bookmarks.
-Go to preferences->Safari and deleted History, Cookies, and Cache
-In iTunes, under Info-Advanced, I selected everything to be replaced with information from my computer - contacts, notes, mail accounts, everything
-Moved the old backup on my hard disk under my home folder ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/backup/(somename) to the Desktop. I didn't delete it in case something went wrong.
-Right click on iPhone in iTunes, select "Backup"

The first backup was very slow - no wonder as it probably backed up 500MB of photos I still had on my phone. Subsequent backups now take less than 30 seconds. Problem solved! Thanks apple forum members!!

Note 1: I then added the apps sync back in iTunes, and now have all my apps back too.

Note 2: Deleting and then re-syncing photos from iPhoto is not a good idea. Because iPhoto shrinks all photos before transferring to the iPhone, so you end up with tiny photos you can't zoom in to. If you keep the originals they stay at 2MP size. That's why I never deleted any since I got the phone (and now I have over 1000 photos 😉 ).

A parting thought: There is definitely something wrong with the backup in OS 3.0, and it's not just about corrupted files. My initial backup was 500MB but that should not take 40 minutes over USB - 5 or 10 would be reasonable. I monitored the data rate using iPulse and saw an average write speed of about 600KB/s. USB allows for a max. write rate of 20MB/s easily (30MB/s on fast devices). So this is way below par even though incremental backups are now fast again. Photos in particular are relatively large files which should transfer at the maximum USB speed.

Purd

Level 1

102 points

Jun 24, 2009 3:18 AM in response to tomagion

I cannot backup my iPhone 2G upgraded to 3.0 firmware at all. After a while, a dialog read "iTunes could not back up the iPhone because the iPhone is disconnected"

This happened every time. However, other sync like apps transfer, song transfer, and podacst sync finished OK

What happened? My iPhone has beenm jailbroken and have Rock Extensions, IntelliScreen installed

iPhone 3.0 also resulted in Springboard crash when new appointments arrived at iPhone from Wxchange server. I have to turn off iPhjone and reboot.

NYRgal

Level 1

65 points

Jun 24, 2009 4:53 AM in response to tomagion

As stated earlier, if you have ESPN ScoreCenter, delete it! My backup was hanging and wouldn't complete. Once I deleted ScoreCenter, backup completes in 60 seconds or less.

Apple didn't design the backup like this, the apps are the issue.

Jun 25, 2009 7:53 AM in response to NYRgal

i also deleted the ESPN.... everything went back to normal woot!

JeanVis

Level 1

14 points

Jun 27, 2009 3:17 AM in response to tomagion

Deleting iWow did the trick for me!

Jun 27, 2009 3:53 AM in response to kgabor00

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a previous thread about slow back ups, that said to remove all apps, which I did and it solved the problem.

You really do have to remove ALL apps to make it work if the problem is continuing when you only remove SOME apps. Yes it may mean you lose some data but you have to choose which option you prefer - to wait hours each time you do a back up, or spend a short time re-inputting data on apps.

Do give this a try as it seems to have worked for most people. Good luck with it.

And to the poster who said the phone only backs up the first time you attach each day, you can force a back up any time by clicking the synch button or right mouse on the device name.

gringley

Level 1

0 points

Jun 27, 2009 7:51 PM in response to Denise Woodcock

I was lucky I guess, deleting NY Times and Wall Street Journal restored my backups to normal. Still have Google, ABC, USA Today, Bloomberg, etc. and have never cleared my Safari. NYT and WSJ always seemed buggy and WSJ was a disappointment content-wise as compared to Bloomberg.

Jul 2, 2009 12:14 PM in response to gringley

I had backups taking 20-30 minutes. I just deleted NYT and WSJ from the iPhone only. Then I did a backup that took less than a minute.

Jul 2, 2009 1:10 PM in response to Stephen Hume

If I'm understanding the issue correctly, it should be resolved by changing the backup process to simply not back up caches. Caches should never be backed up and restored, anyway. They're volatile data by nature and are refreshed as needed.

Jul 2, 2009 4:56 PM in response to sbessel

@sbessel

Thanks! This thread, this posting in particular, did it for me. I took half the way after 15 minutes. Not finished yet 😉

I'm a heavy user of newsfeeds, among them also twittelator pro, newsstand, etc. Lot's of cash consuming programs. My problem was even worse after installing firmware 3.0. After hours of backing up I received the message (see now it's in Dutch), someting like 'The iphone can't be synchronized. It's not possible to read from the disk or write to the disk.'

Even when installing the new firmware there where alarming messages. Like (again translated) "The iphone can not be restored. An unknown error did occur [2]." However, when I succeeded after repeated efforts, the iPhone was fully functional without any problems.
It was hard finding a thread like this. I wonder, why? When obvious so many people experience these problems, even before firmware 3.0. But 3.0 seems to even enlarged this problem.

I removed more than 2/3 of the programs installed. Unchecked it from iTunes. Same with the pictures. Now it works for the first time since, being busy for half an hour (it's slowing down) and half the way. I still wonder what keeps it so occupied. Can it be my three emailaccounts?

Following the backup directory I still count 3500 objects. I should expect much bigger (speed) jumps after removing so many apps.

THEN IT WENT WRONG AGAIN....

Back to the backup: It stopped. I looked in the latest backup mdinfo file. Till my suprise it was Cooliris! Suprise, because I removed it. It was not visible on my iphone anymore - but still there. So I tried to check it again in iTunes for a proper install to uncheck it later. On that point my pc froze. Reason for being able to finish this text is my FireFox Session Manager 😉

Cooliris seems a real pain in the ***. Was it 3.0 ready? But I guess that firmware 3.0 also suffers some main bugs.

Then I re-installed Cooliris on my iPhone via Appstore. It took at least five minutes to finish installation. Than I uninstalled and did a reset. When PC and iPhone were ready again (after removing Cooliris from iTunes) I again started a backup. Almost ten minutes now and almost finished....

... last part still took some time [Fizz Weather], but backup finished after 25 minutes!!! Few hours ago I thought my iPhone finally needed to be repaired. Thanks to this great thread, in particular thanks to sbessel! You saved me a lot frustration and I learned a lot!

Spread the word...

Jul 13, 2009 3:06 PM in response to Purd

I'm having the same issue... did you ever find a solution?

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