Brothers and sisters, My backup went all night, and I had just two bars. I bit the bullet and did a restore without a backup. It worked perfectly, and now my backups take 20 seconds! I heartily recommend a restore if your backup isn't working or is painfully slow.
I am trying to run a backup first before I install IOS4. It has run overnight (from 9:00pm to 7:30am) and is only slightly over half way. This is insane! There is no good reason for a backup to take this long. Even 3 hours is way too long. What really needs to be backed up besides your texts, apps and some other minor configuration stuff? I've got around 800MB of apps and 150MB of "other"; less than 1GB total. There's no need to backup your music, you've already got that saved. There is definitely something wrong here. Maybe it might be better to wait for IOS4.1.
Maybe I don't want all my email accounts (three) combined. I have a work email account that I don't want combined with my personal emails. Is there an option to keep them separate?
thx for the tip! just seeing a little movement in the folder info was encouraging 🙂 after several attempts, it finally cut loose and appears to be updating fairly quickly now!
Hi all I found out that we can still restore to a previous pre-update backup and get some previously synced information and settings back. I had to prove to an Apple CSR that simply restoring to a backup I made two weeks ago wouldn't affect my firmware, and it was as though I just took my phone back in time (with the crappy OS tagging along.)
If your update backup hangs or you haven't started to update-- cancel it, do a regular sync of your phone just like you would if you were going on vacation for a week and make sure that you check Sync Address Book Contacts, Sync iCal Calendars, and under Other check if you want iTunes to save your Safari bookmarks and Notes. Under Advanced on the info tab do NOT check "Replace information on this phone" unless this is your usual sync process. For those who regularly cancel their backups, let iTunes backup your phone as part of the sync process this time.
And it never hurts to copy your photos onto your harddrive with Picasa or Image Capture, email important notes to yourself, write down your boss's home phone number somewhere etc.
At this point you can choose to strip your phone if you want to, it seems like the update backup is hanging on photos and app store apps, so this might speed up the process. I did it by restoring to factory defaults and setting it up as a new phone, but you can also go in and pick and choose what to take off the phone. After you update, you can right-click/control-click your phone on the left-hand menu and restore to your special pre-update backup (it will be the one with today's date on it. The one that just says YourName's iPhone is the update backup.) Restoring to this backup will not affect your firmware upgrade, fortunately/unfortunately, but should sync your apps and info back onto the phone just like you had them before. Again, if you don't see another backup to choose from, look in your recycle bin.
If you have lost contacts and settings and such you should be able to do this, also, and you'll just take your phone back to the date of your previous update.
Again, firmware doesn't budge. I got a great update, (just not happy with the OS,) and this is what I did to prep for this process based on problems I had last year with a disastrous move to 3.0. Hope this helps someone somewhere...
Once 4.0 has dowloaded, click "stop" on the backup popup to quit the hung backup. Then, do a manual backup of your iPhone. Once manual backup is done, click on "restore" (to factory settings) on main iPhone screen in iTunes. Confirm the restore, and it will wipe your phone and install IOS 4.0. Then, you get the option to either "setup as a new iPhone" (DO NOT do this one!) or "Restore from backup" -- that's what you want. Confirm it, select the most recent backup, and hit "continue". It will reload all the software, then start a sync that reloads your apps, music, photos, other data, etc. The whole process took about 40 minutes start to finish on my 3G. Once the final sync finishes, do another manual backup just for safety, and you are good to go.
I'm am having the same problem here. I started my update night before last and let it run overnight. When I woke up yesterday morning it still wasn't done. My computer was also running dangerously hot. I think it was about 6 hrs and it still wasn't past 15%-20%. I tried it again today and I'm still having the same problem. I think I'm gonna wait for a while to do this update and try it again later.
PERFECT......worked for me. 3G buzzing like a bee. I followed instructions in your posted link, Soulblighter33...took less than an hour to restore and resync from backup!!! This was after MANY tries the old-fashioned way (following instructions within iTunes) 🙂
THANK YOU, Soulblighter33!!!!!! My process of updating was painless!!! I had about given up hope!!!! You saved my day!!!!
(Click on Soulblighter33's name in this message heading and you will be taken to the message that is referenced....)
I have a 16gb iPod touch which i believe is 3g but im not sure. I had put it onto update and it took over an hour to update when i came back i was given an error message. Any thoughts?
My husband and I both have 3Gs phones. The iOS4 update worked on his the first time he tried! Granted it took almost 3-4 hours start to finish but it still worked. Mine STILL hasnt worked...it'll go for over 8 hours and still look like it has a good 10% or more to go in "backup" mode. So like always I end up hitting cancel cause I cant sit for days and wait on my phone to finish. Any thoughts on what I should do? I've gotten almost all my pictures and videos off my phone and am thinking of taking all the apps off and seeing if that helps. He had more available memory than me when he started the update but thats the only difference...I cant imagine what would be the hold up! Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!
