How to tell iTune to keep every backup?

How does Time Machine help you keep copies of full backups each time, unless it removes or renames the current backup folder after it backs it up so that iTunes is always making a full fresh backup (thinking it hasn't done one before)? Isn't the issue here the fact that iTunes sees an existing backup and just gets the changes the next time out?

Am I getting it 100% yet?

No. The normal iPhone backup is an incremental backup, in that only data that has changed is backed up or removed from the backup. There is no "running backup". You delete data on your phone, then sync, it will be removed from your iPhone backup, with NO WAY to recover it.

If it didn't work this way, users hard drives would quickly fill up with, for the most part, useless iPhone backups.

The only reason I've got this data preserved is that it's included with the Time Machine backups, which I keep for other reasons.

The bottom line is that the iTunes backup process is in this respect very unintuitive. For Blackberries, the backup manager makes a full (or selective) backup each time it is asked to do so, saving the file in a normal place with a normal name, followed by the date and incremental numbers if more than one backup is made in one day. Any one of the backup files are essentially snapshots of all the data at that time and can be used to restore to the phone at any time. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is done incrementally. That makes a lot more sense to me that the method used by iTunes. If some data gets deleted or corrupted somehow, there isn't an easy path to getting back using iTunes. For a company like Apple that is so attuned to the user experience, this is troubling.

Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more. The iTunes backup process is, IMO, well thought out & does the job for 99.999% of all users.

I've given you two options to do what you want.

OK I get it - I just don't like it. So the iPhone really keeps only one backup that is a snapshot of the current phone data. Period. The only thing we are discussing is how it does it mechanically. Instead of writing a full backup, it just modifies the previous backup on the theory that it's faster than writing it all over again. Am I right, now?

Ya got it now.

Not only to to improve speed, but to save hard drive space. Much more data involved here that any Crackberry 😎.

And I assume that answers my previous question about Time Machine in that you essentially back up a snapshot of your phone each time you back up the folder. And if/when you want to restore any particular snapshot, you would manually drag it into MobileSync and iTunes would find it.

You're right. Blackberries are far more limited in the data. But I have to say, if you only want to back up SMS, then it's much easier because you can set it up that way from the start.

Now, final question: under the hood, in all those hex-named folders, will I actually find an accumulation of the SMS files from which I could then manually extract all the SMS data? Or is the old SMS data completely gone if some of it was deleted before the last backup? I'm not talking about getting iTunes to restore it, but using software that can read that file.

Unlike the iPhone iTunes backup process, Time Machine actually backs up all changes without overwriting anything. That's why I have every iPhone backup going back to 2007. But, I've got several terabytes of backup storage...how many users, anywhere, keep that kind of data..I do for other reasons.

macintosh1984 wrote:

Or is the old SMS data completely gone

You delete it on your phone, it's gone from your iPhone backup.

Wait a second....

I assumed Time Machine just backs up folders and that all you're doing is constantly backing up the MobileSync folder. Are you saying that Time Machine makes an iPhone backup directly from the phone? I'm a PC user and new to the Mac so I am not that familiar with Time Machine.

It improves speed by orders of magnitude. The early versions would take up to 12 hours to complete a backup.

No, Time Machine does not backup the iPhone, but that data is included in the Time Machine backup. The beauty of Time Machine is that data is not overwritten, thus any and all changes are continually backed up. This permits you to "go back in time" and restore that document you created 6 months ago but just screwed up. Same thing with iPhone backups...I can can back & recover any iPhone backup I want...all the way to 2007.

Reading more on Time Machine - all this is hitting me like a ton of bricks - it seems you can only back up your entire drive. I guess all I would want is to set it up to back up the MobileSync folder every x days. Can this not be done?

Time Machine takes an hourly "snapshot" of your entire disk. So if you need to retrieve something from 3 hours ago you click Time Machine and see a stack of windows, one for each hour.

In terms of its internal operation it only actually copies files that have changed, but that is transparent to the user.