taking forever to backup

I would do a manual backup again.

A little background on my experiences.....

I was trying to backup my daughter’s iPhone 6 to iCloud in anticipation of getting a new phone for her. She had iTunes backups but I wanted redundancy for her phone like I have for my devices. Anyway, her backup was going to be about 8.5 GB. I initiated the backup on my own. It seemed to go well for about 30 minutes but the estimates times kept changing. The time would go up, and then it would drop. It went like this for about another hour and I didn’t see any real progress. I got impatient so I stopped the backup, restarted her phone and tried again. The second time it went very smoothly and took less than 90 minutes.

On occasion, my wife’s iPhone and my iPhone will not backup automatically overnight and we get the cryptic “some files were not available for backup” and the backup doesn’t take place. If I try to start a backup on my own, 9 times out of 10 it will not work. The phones will not allow me to quit the backup (turn the iCloud backup off) or sometimes I can’t restart the backup. So what I do is quit the settings app, restart the phones, start another backup on my own and it never fails to work when I do that.

YMMV, but I have done this over and over again with success. You have nothing to lose since the backup isn’t working anayway.

I know some people would advise against this, but I would cancel the backup, restart the phone and try again. I have done this a few times myself on different devices and it always worked for me.

There is no way a 60GB backup should take 4 days. It may take over 24 hours the first time you do it, and that would be a longtime, but 4 days is ridiculous, IMHO.

Well, I’m glad to hear that you were finally able to complete a backup. Whether you do it manually or allow the phone to backup automatically, it really shouldn’t take nearly as long as this backup took.

You can’t selectively choose content from a backup to restore to a device. It is all or nothing when you restore a backup. The idea behind restoring a backup is to backup your old device and then transfer the contents to a new device before using the new device. Once you have used it, you will have to erase what is on it if you want to restore the backup. Moving forward, backing up will preserve the data and settings on the new device so that if something goes wrong, you can restore the backup to retrieve your information.

Good luck. Please let me know how it turns out for you.