Sync taking extremely long time

Two big issues with backups (not really issues, but due to how people use their phones).

If you have an app that writes a lot of data then that data is compared and for changes backsup. Facebook is a common program that writes out a lot of data.

But a more common one is this. Some users do not use the Camera Roll as intended. The camera roll is a totally different part of the file system on the phone. It is more like FAT32 separate partition in a way. This is how it gets identified as a Digital Camera when you plug in.

Originally photos were NOT part of the back up as the user was expected to take photos off to their computer themselves. But too many never took them off and thus they added it to the backup process (like back at update 2.0 of the OS).
However, because of this, it is takes each photo each time and compresses and backs up into the backup database.

So for users that keep a lot of photos on the Camera Roll, the more they have, the longer backup takes and it is cross talking across file formats and more translation code.

The proper way to deal with the camera roll is you should always take off your photos from it when you sit down to sync. Get them onto your computer and organized as you want. For photos you want on your phone, you sync them back via iTunes and thus put into their own libraries outside of the Camera roll. Thus they are onto the real part of the OS's partition and iTunes also keeps track of what was on phone and what is new thus no need to back up in the process since the photos are already on your computer.

And as you noted the longer you take between syncs, the longer the backup due to more changes to data over time.

Glad it helped. Only from coming here often have I heard of the Facebook issue. While data may not change often in Facebook itself, we are unsure how the developer is working with it's own local data/cache (eg: is it downloading copies every time and not clearing out old stuff...etc)

There have been other issues about Facebook with uninstalling and putting back (happened to my wife and others here). Glad you didn't have same issue.

Using iOS4 w/ iPhone4, faced extremely long sync times.

Tried removing FACEBOOK, and voila!

Will research on why.

Thanks to the person who figured it out above.