Huge Time to Sync iPhone 11 with iOS v13.3

I have an iPhone 11 Pro running v13.3 and my Mac Pro (2013) is running v10.15.2.


I used to be able to sync up my phone in minutes when only a few items (photos, songs, etc) had to be synced up. For the last few months (not sure exactly when this started), every time I sync, it takes 30 - 60 minutes or more. The status circle is moving, and I see the photos in my largest folder syncing up (they move around as new ones get added), but all the photos I see were already on the phone. Out of thousands of photos I only added a few, so why does it take so long to sync? Is it no longer sync'ing up incrementally? It's as if it's syncing the entire phone each time. I add just a few songs or photos, and it takes forever to sync.


BTW I did a full back up first then I hit the sync button afterwards. The backup was faster than the sync. I did a test and added only a few new photos to a folder and the sync took 45 minutes or so. I have 237GB on a 505GB memory iPhone 11. Keep in mind on my iPhone X, I had about 200GB on a 250GB phone and NEVER had this problem. It would sync up photos and music in minutes.


Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong or is this something new? If it's not me, Apple needs to fix this.


Thx!

iPhone 11 Pro, iOS 13

Posted on Dec 22, 2019 9:01 PM

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4 replies

Jan 20, 2020 6:26 AM in response to YuckyDarren

I called Apple and they said they would escalate it and someone would contact me. Never happened. But I think I figured it out what may have been the cause. Not 100% sure, but when I changed over to the new OS it defaulted to syncing everything. Now this doesn't mean it should backup everything every time, but it seemed to be doing that. So after I selected what I wanted to sync, it's been working better. So plug in the phone and open a window. When the info comes up, note the tabs "General", "Music", "Movies, etc . Click on each and make sure you're only syncing the data you want. If you have a lot of photos in Apple Photos on your Mac then it may be backing up everything each time the first time you move to the OS. This is just a guess. After I selected what I wanted to sync it worked better.

Dec 23, 2019 5:42 AM in response to U2GT

I did another sync this morning. I imported some pics into Photos and then sync'd them to some custom folders I set up. It was only 50 or so photos out of thousands that were already sync'd up last night. I started the sync about 20 minutes ago and it's not even half way done. Something is very wrong with sync on the new software on the iPhone and/or Mac.

Dec 23, 2019 6:01 AM in response to U2GT

One other thing to note. All the folders from "On My Mac" say "Syncing...." at the bottom of the folder contents. And in one of my larger folders of photos, I can see all the frames moving around as it loads in the photos. So it's absolutely re-syncing every single photo all over again. This is just ridiculous. It should only be syncing up the few new ones I added.

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Huge Time to Sync iPhone 11 with iOS v13.3

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