iTunes could not restore the iPhone, because the iPhone refused the request

Hello,

thanks to the information I found here I was able to find out WHAT goes wrong on my iTunes backups - but unfortunately not WHY.

Initial problem (Windows 7, iPhone 4s, iOS 5.1.1 - and NO, I will NOT allow iOS 6 to be installed!):

I can't restore my iPhone 4s from an older backup as I always get "couldn't be restored because backup couldn't be saved".

All former backups I had have NULLs in the status.plist file, so I couldn't just copy it over to the recent backup.

I tried, but to no avail. I also tried a backup on a new user account, but that status.plist was bad either.

So i tried the following:

a) killing all Apple processes

b) deleting the lockdown folder

c) deleting all in the backup folder (after saving it elsewhere)

d) rebooting the iPhone

e) launching iTunes again

f) reconnecting the iPhone

Then iTunes started immediately to back up and sync the iPhone.

The backup step too a moment - much longer than before, but not as fast as for a full backup.

I fired up the iPhone configuration program, and the iPhone console log showed:

...

Oct 16 20:00:14 Peters-4s BackupAgent2[122] <Warning>: WARNING: Finished backup in 91.236 s

Oct 16 20:00:28 Peters-4s atc[113] <Error>: Property list invalid for format: 200 (property lists cannot contain NULL)

...

So iTunes creates a status.plist file with NULLs right after a completely fresh backup.

So here is my questions:

a) Can anybody please provide me a proper status.plist that I could use?

b) Does anybody have an idea how to fix whatever must be causing the problem?

Thanks in advance,

Peter

what if there are no .plist files in the backup folder i want?

Can I use a .plist from another iPhone to restore?

The backup before is corrupted, but I don't have the iPhone from that backup anymore because I got a replacement.

So was thinking about putting the .plist from the replacement phone in the backup. Is this possible?

man, you saved my life today!

thank you so much

it worked immediately.

i owe you a bottle of champagne!!!

Giac

ur so helpful. thank you very muchh 😀

thanks so much for putting this out here this really helped, what i would recommend for windows 8 users is when you find the file status.plist on the new account, copy that to your new accounts desktop. it will be alot easier to find that way when you switch back to the original account.