i unboxed my iPad, activated, then downloaded some apps straight on the device. went back to sync about 3 hours ago and its about 75% done with the "Backing up" stage in iTunes. its definitely moving, just ever so slowly. reminds me of the slow backups in iPhone OS 2.0
anyone else seeing this?
yes, disable by clicking on the small "x" to the right of "backing up" after you begin to backup/sync at the top of the itunes screen...i hope they fix this soon.
Add me to the list to the problem. I'm a bit more fortunate cause my sync ONLY take an hour to complete. Thanks Apple for 'rewarding' us early adopters aka blind supporters with this problem and not fixing it after pages and pages of threads on this problem.
I had the same problem. I phoned support, and they had me swap it out for a new one at the Apple store. I'm sticking a bunch of content on my new one now, we'll see how long the backup takes tonight.
There's got to be some way to disable the backup other than clicking the little x (sometimes that works, sometimes it just freezes iTunes).
The issue could be caused by conflicting security software.
Does iTunes backup the iPad quicker on another computer?
What security software is installed on the computer? Try changing the security software settings or updating it. You can also try the troubleshooting steps in this article
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3125.
Initially, my iPad sync'd fine. Then, a few days ago, it started taking a long time to back-up (3 hours).
Here's how I cured my problem:
I searched the net and someone said it could be due to apps directly load from App Store to iPad. The theory is that one or two apps get messed up and the back-up hangs due to these apps. So I unchecked all my apps except for GoodReader, performed a sync and then reloaded all the same apps - Problem Solved! (at least for me). I no longer download directly from the App Store to my iPad.
Its definately an app on the iPad that is causing this problem. In iTunes, I clicked on sync apps, and unselected all of them. It warned me that it would remove all the apps from the iPad, which I agreed to. I unplugged and replugged the ipad into iTunes, and the backup took about 20 seconds! I'm now re-adding my apps one at a time to find the culprit, I suspect its the WSJ app.
As a followup to my previous post, I reinstalled all the apps (from iTunes, not loaded from the iPad itself), and the backup flies. Maybe someone could try just removing all apps from their iPad, and resync them all back from iTunes on the computer, and see if that alleviates the issue. Thanks!
I've identified the issue (for my slow backups, at least), and can replicate the problem at will on both Mac and PC iTunes.
Essentially, the folder containing the backup data (\users\<name>\appdata\roaming\apple computer\mobile sync\backup\<longstringofnumbers-you-can-ID-by-timestamp>) has too many files in it. The OS overhead in dealing with a folder with that much junk in it is huge -- and that's totally ignoring the possibility of bad memory management on the part of iTunes...
Mine is being caused by having a bunch of comic books (each of which is composed of 30-50 small JPG images).
Starting with a clean iPad, it's just a little slow:
Added 300 comics (3.4 Gigs)
1 hour 54 mins to backup
Before adding - Backup folder: 1.64 GB/7,593 files
After adding - Backup folder: 4.38 GB/31,455 files
Once the backup folder gets above about 40K files, here's the performance:
Added 300 comics (3.4 Gigs)
12 hours, 8 minutes to back up
Before adding - Backup folder 5.31 G/39,943 files
After adding - Backup folder: 9.82 Gigs/78,459 files
I've wiped my iPad twice now to confirm these numbers (you get about a 5% variation between Mac & PC, with no rhyme or reason I can detect). I've just resigned myself to only adding 100 comics per day to my collection (that's faster than I can consume them, but I'd really like to have everything stored on the #!@$ thing). This lets me start a sync when I go to bed. Last few night's numbers:
100 comics
6 hours, 30 mins
10.7 Gigs/86,563 files
100 comics
6 hours, 30 mins
11.4 gigs/93,329 files
I'm not sure what else can be done. I've reported it as a bug, and have an ongoing trouble ticket, but my senior tech guy has stopped responding to emails, and I'm not convinced anything will be done about it any time soon.
This is only a problem with 3rd-party data -- you can have a million tiny songs/photos/videos, and iTunes doesn't try to shove them into the backup folder. And on the iPhone, with only 16 gigs of space, the problem wasn't quite as noticeable (it is repeatable, however, using comics on an iPhone). QA probably never tried a scenario like this.
I'm pretty sure rewriting the backup system will not be done overnight, if at all...
I have the same problem. IPad 32g has been backing up for 7 hours now and status bar not even at 50%! This is ridiculous!! Also, I have it plugged into a USB 2.0 but it still is not charging, which means I may run out of juice before the backup even finishes. Is there going to be a fix for this? This is completely unacceptable.
Well, here's a possible work-around for those using Windows XP (it's clearly not a fix). I tried a number of the other fixes, such as not backing up GoodReader, but it was still taking several hours.
I went to Task Manager and watched the Processes as the back-up process was running, and noticed that the AppleMobileDeviceService.exe would only execute for a second and even then it was only taking about 3% of the CPU cycles. It would then go to 0% CPU cycles for about another second or two, and then the process would repeat again. The movement of the progress line in iTunes was almost imperceptible. I would point out that I wasn't running any other programs at the time so I noticed most of the remaining CPU cycles would go to System Idle Process.
I then highlighted and did a right click on the AppleMobileDeviceService.exe and changed the "Set Priority" to "Realtime", which of course caused Task Manager to issue a dire warning - which I promptly ignored. Once I changed the priority, the progress line started to move at a noticeable rate. It took about an hour to do the back-up after I made the change. It's a bit risky, if you believe the dire warning that Task Manager issues, but it did work for me.
Taking forever here too. I do buy almost all apps directly on my iPad (and iPhone), so can believe that it's the problem. I used Instruments on my Mac and found that the AppleMobileBackup application is creating hundreds of files in the backup folder, with the result that you see a disk write spike every 8 seconds or so, but very little CPU used.
I clicked the "x" to get out of the backup, and ended up in a second loop, did it again, and then it started backing up my purchases (listing each app by name), and then continued to copy PDFs and books to iBooks, etc, just fine. Sync'd photos, perhaps. Eventually said the iPad went offline. Seemed to do what I needed it to do.
Same here just bought the 16 gig Wi-Fi/3g iPad and sync is now 45 min with 1.8 gigs of songs and 2 gigs of pic. It may take another 45 min since its only half way thru, and that's not even counting the sync time.
