iTunes stuck on last stage of sync, "Waiting for items to copy", NEVER COMPLETES??

Deleting the voice memo worked for me! Thanks!

I tried EVERYTHING suggested in this discussion short of doing a restore, fearful of losing my stuff. Finally, after three days of frustration I gave up and clicked the restore button and crossed my fingers.

One hour later my iPad was syncing perfectly and even though I did not click the backup button all my music, photos, apps, and bookmarks were there. My guess is that it has something to do with the old problem iTunes used to have when it couldn't locate files in the library.

Do not be afraid...RESTORE, RESTORE, RESTORE!!!

I still think that iOS5 is buggy because too often an error message pops up when I'm syncing on wifi. But for the most part things are as they should be.

Deleting voice memos from the iPhone and then resynching worked for me. None of the other methods worked in my case.

Hello everyone,

Probably like you, I was a bit overwhelmed by all the solutions and ideas that worked for some and not others.

I upgraded my 3GS to iOS5 last week and today was the first time I had tried syncing. I had all the same probs - so getting to step 7 for me and not completing the 'genius' bit of the sync... that is well described in all these posts.

I did try deleting the voice memo file I found in my voice memo app but that didnt help...

Anyway, what fixed it for me was simply to restore the iphone to original settings and then to load on an old back up. One word of warning, after I restored, the first (and most recent backup) loaded onto the phone. All seemed to be OK, until I checked the phones contacts. for some odd reason 75% of my contacts were missing. I immediately loaded a back up I did about a week ago. Thank God it was there to choose from.

Now the phone is fine and more importantly, its now syncing perfectly.

For now.

Hope this helps.

Same problem here. Syncs about half of my music then mysteriously says "cancelling sync" and then quits syncing. I have even resored the iphone and moved the library to a new computer to try and it still fails.

Interesting that every time it fails, the iphone returns to the home screen regarless of what screen you were on while it was synching.

Latest versions of everything and fails on the iphone 4 and 4s. Went to genius bar and they couldn't help. Said they were escalating to apple engineers but I haven't heard anything from them yet and dont know if I will.

Hope they fix it soon. It is frustrating.

This worked for me too for my iPhone 3G, after many many hours of frustraton! Thanks

deleting a voice memo also allowed me to get beyond step 6 of 6 - Perhaps because there doesn't seem to be any special folder or playlist for voice memos in iTunes, it gets confused as to what to do. I have a iphone 3GS with iOS 5 installed 3 days ago.

HELP!!!

When I first updated my iphone 4 to ios 5 everything works, and i was able to sync all the changes i made that day to my iphone 4 without problem. Two days later and i come back trying to sync more music and movies onto the iphone and fails every time.

I've tried syncing individual items, or arist and nothing work so far. I even cleared all my library and have it sync whatever is in the library and it won't work either.

Nothing is added to the iphone, it won't even update my apps......

I really don't want to restore my phone, because i don't even know if it is properly backed up or not since syncs are not completed.

it will go

>Waiting to backup

>Backup

>prepare to sync app

>prepare to sync changes

>sync safari safe browsing data

>CANCEL SYNC

Cancel sync??? WHY??

Just ensure you selected what u want to sync and hit apply.. Your info will sync.. When u reach to "waiting for files to copy".. Just eject & you'll be fine.. Your files will be transferred.. Steve Jobs is dead, so now we have to accept less than excellent service from Apple and wait for a fix.. Apple is too arrogant to accept that there is a glitch so soon after the release of IOS5.. Let's hope this fix comes soon.

This worked for me:

I copied the "Voice Memos" folder out of my iTunes library and then deleted it from the iTunes UI. Then I also deleted them from the app on the iPhone itself." Thanks to Bruce Bell-Myers

I just connected my iPhone 4 til iTunes on my Mac with my USB and backed it up and restored it. This fixed it for me.

🙂

No, you are not really fine by ejecting the device. You can then observe that your others grows by magnitudes. But maybe I have a totally different issue: My books/pdfs won't get updated. If missing, ok, they are added. If changed, nothing happens.

Did the restore trick, deleted voice memos and now I am with the album artwork trick. Maybe it works, but right now I haven't had a successful sync. From time to time it runs through, but it isn't really in sync. All other iOs devices left rather a mixed feeling. It looks, as if the iPhones run smoother through the whole process, but the iPads **** me off.

And after a week of wireless syncs I wouldn't say anymore that it works. Looking closely you find more or less subtle sync errors. Some devices haven't synced at all. Additionally we have a pretty mixed setup with 3 Macs and around 10 iOS devies, so I would say it IS A GENERAL problem.

I've been working on this for days, tried ALL the above quick fixes, and the ONLY thing that instantly worked has been restoring the device from my last backup.

Also, just because your device does not finish syncing on its own does not mean that it's not syncing. At least in my (and other's) case. You just have to quit out of iTunes, or eject the device.

RESTORE - it works, it's easy, and you should not lose any data or settings whatsoever - provided your backup is intact and you don't screw up the restore. 🙂

It appears that the only thing that has worked for me is restoring. I tried to restore from a back up and still had problems. I restored a fresh iOS without using a backup. it works and syncs fine now. I did not turn on the voice memos. I will be dissappointed if I cannot use that function....I will check it later...for now I can sync and I am happy with that.

I may add that I did discover that, although I was getting the "waiting for Items to copy" at the end of my sync process, I did notice that my changes and additions had indeed gone through successfully. If I ejected, the changes were canceled. However if I just unpluged it, the changes would remain on my Phone. So, for a while there, I would just unplug it without ejecting. (naughty me).

Deleting the artwork cache worked for me. Many thanks.