Syncing stays on 'waiting for items to copy' with iOS 5

Hey everyone! I was just having the same problem earlier. Alls I had to do was force quit, or shut down, iTunes. I restarted it and resynced my iPod and it worked! (:

@kyla2015,

In my experience, if one waits long enough the message disappears and the syncing completes. In my case, "long enough" means a few hours, depending on the changes that I've made to the collections being synced since the last sync. I mostly add photos to iPhoto, sometimes around a hundred new photos.

QUESTION: Does your sync eventually complete?

QUESTION: Aprrox. how large are the collections that you are syncing? Music? Photos?

QUESTION: Were you syncing when you (force) quit iTunes? If so, how did the iOS device react?

QUESTION: When you restarted iTunes and resynced, did the message, "waiting for items to copy" appear? Is the sync correct, i.e., are all the items that you expect to be on the iOS device really there?

QUESTION: Have you synced the iOS device after the (force) quitting iTunes, restarting it and resyncing? If so, is syncing now faster? What about the message?

Thanks,

Richard

So...for kyla it was happening on her iPod, for me it was happening on my gen1 iPad, and my sisters gen2 iPad and my iPhone4 . And it didn not correct after many hours of being connected...However I did manage to overcome the problem by doing what somebody else had suggested. First I unchecked every check I had on the ipad in apps, music, photos, contacts etc etc. Second, once the device was totally devoid of added things such as apps, music, contacs, photos etc etc, I synced the device to the computer. Third, I readded the things I wanted on teh device such as those I previously mentioned... Fourth, I re synced the devices....and BINGO!! all back to normal!!!...this worked well on all of the devices I was having a problem with. Bear in mind I had been wrestling with this issue for probably at least a week maybe more...and had tried other things like kyla has suggested to no avail.

@paulinefrommarraween,

I am a bit confused about the sequence of events. I suspect my confusion stems from the phrase, "once the device was totally devoid of added things". I think that making changes to the things being synced, e.g., checking an event in Photos, or unchecking an album in Music -- or, unchecking "every check" -- has no effect until you click Apply or Sync. So, you simply unchecked "every check" and click Apply or Sync, right? Whether the unchecked stuff really disappeared from the iOS device before you clicked Apply or Sync, you don't really know, do you? Or did you examine the iOS device directly immediately after unchecking?

Then, what about unchecking "every check"? For example, in the Photos tab for my iPhone 4S I have checked "Sync Photos from iPhoto", selected the radio button "Selected albums, Events, and Faces, and automatically include the 10 most recent Events" and, under Events, I have checked some events in addition to the 10 most recent, which are checked but greyed out. If I uncheck "Sync Photos from iPhoto", then everything else that was selected or checked is greyed out, so I cannot unselect or uncheck them. Would/did you in such cases, (A) merely unselect or uncheck, say, the events, or (B) (A) plus then uncheck "Sync Photos from iPhoto", or (C) just uncheck "Sync Photos from iPhoto"? It would seem sufficient to just uncheck "Sync Photos from iPhoto", but you never know.

Regards,

Richard

Richard, it means...anything you might have added to the device such as applications, music, photos, contacts, calendars and etc....I had to uncheck everything before it would work!...ie before I could get them to sync at all. Otherwise it would hang for hours and hours without progressing...and for that matter...it was STEP 7. Its worth noting that step 7 no longer exists on these devices so what the heck was it anyway...I had actually tried resetting 2 of the devices and restoring...but I was only restoring it back to the same previous back up..

@paulinefrommarraween,

I must be thick or something. What would you suggest that I uncheck with regard to the Photos tab? The reason I keep on coming back to this point is, I tried once before just unchecking "Sync Photos from iPhoto", and iTunes asked me whether I wanted to delete the photos on the iOS device, too, or just stop syncing photos. I chose to delete the photos from the iPad 1, and then iTunes displayed a message like "waiting for changes to be applied" (working from memory here). I don't recall what actually happened subsequently. I believe iTunes eventually displayed an error message, the Photos app on the iPad 1 was empty, but iTunes showed a significant increase in the "Other" files on the device, and they prevented resyncing the photos that were on the iPad before I unchecked "Sync Photos from iPhoto".

It is at any rate a painful process. I can only imagine that it serves to get the iOS device and iTunes back in sync, i.e., to get them both to agree that there are no photos on the device.

Regards,

Richard

I personally unchecked everything...if you have your photos in a folder/s on iPhoto this shouldnt be a real problem as you would just select the same folder/s again. I guess you could try not unchecking them and see if it works...if so...all power to you...I went for the lot and readded what I wanted as well as re adding the apps and all other things that I wanted to sync. ~Pauline

"back up to computer" automatically switches back to iCloud-

Just noticed this issue today. Admittedly I haven't synced to the computer in a long time since I've been using iCloud (basically only sync on occasion now in order to desk with my photos). I'm on a pc btw. I will add, that when I synced today, as in months past, I would check " back up to computer". Then I hit apply. This time however, when I hit apply, then hit sync, I noticed it reverted back to "back up to iCloud" (in other words, the iCloud option was again selected). So, I didn't catch this in the threads I read here (many but not all). Just wanted to add that. Will try deleting voice memos to see if that helps. I'm not about to mess with doing a restore etc.

All i needed to do was uncheck all the ringtones under Tones, then hit sync. That solved the problem. Then I clicked back all the ringing tones with no problem on synching.

unchecking voice memos in my itunes seemed to work for me too - even though I didn't think I had any!

Look very carefully guys: The number of updates next to apps in the library VERY SLOWLY decreases during this time, wait for it to tick down to zero

@tommcq,

Are you trying to say, you think that while the message, "Waiting for items to copy," is being displayed, syncing is actually waiting for the apps in the library to update?

Richard

@Richard Liu

sure seems that way, i guess i had cancelled it so many times all that was left was the huge apps in excess of 1GB which meant they were copying but just taking a while as you might expect. though i did find it strange that my disk access light was ot flashing during this time and also that i am pretty sure my updates download on the computer when i do them on the ipad

@tommcq,

I am presently syncing my iPad (original). The message, "Waiting for changes to be applied" is displaying. In the leftmost column of iTunes, at the very top, I see "LIBRARY" and under it, among other things, "Apps". There is no number being displayed next to "Apps", let alone being decremented. So I guess updating apps is not the cause of my problem.

Richard

It appears that this can be traced to a variety of sources. So I went through them one by one ... I had no voice memos to not there .. but I did have a wonky PDF file and once I deleted it from iTunes the next sync went smoothly - and quickly!