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

Having looked at all the responses, fixes, workarounds etc, as well as my own experiences and testing, I am now fairly confident that the issue lies in some residual files not completely cleared just prior to update.

For example, if you had a voice memo, or in my case, a rental video that had expired, and had not been synchronised prior to the upgrade to v5, then in many cases, that can no longer be deleted.

As a consequence, these filenames are effectively orphaned and regardless of attempts to delete will continue to attempt to synchronise.

The problem with attempting some of the workarounds suggested here is that not all of them work in all cases and there is a risk of lost data, particularly game scores and so on.

I really do think that this is an issue that Apple Support need to address in the form of either a patch or minor version release.

Come on Apple, this issue is all over the Internet now with a significant number of your users affected. Not just those that shout on this 'Apple Support Communities' forum, but the silent ones too.

Niloc_415, thanks for the detailed steps. I may be trying that this evening if the current "Restore to Factory Settings then Restore from Backup" doesn't work....

i had same problem , what i did was to restore my ipod, remember to back up first, but first re install i tunes then do a ipod restore, then if you have many files to  sync, especially with photos, i made another folder and synced a few albums at a time

I tried all the suggestions re the voice memos etc but in the end reverted to doing a complete resore and now it works just fine.

I'm having the exact same issue with my iPad 1...

It would be nice if Apple read these discussions and offered a solution! Shouldn't have to try several differents suggestions from device owners.

I'm undergoing the same issue as I type this. I'm only transferring music, and it appears to have worked, even though the syncing process is stuck on (step 5 of 5) "Waiting for items to copy." I am new to Apple, so I really don't know what is going on.

Thanks nodrog666 for telling me that the voice memos have to be deleted. I've spent hours trying to get my iPhone 3GS to do a complete sync. Deleting the voice memos did the trick. I have no idea why, but it doesn't matter.

This is it! I did sync one category after the other and it worked. It was the books section on mine. Maybe some pdf didn't let the sync to finish. Re-sync after that with all categories checked (but books) and worked in perfection. Now I will try to determine which file (in books section) is the bad one. Thanks a lot m8!

I've spent the past three days struggling with this issue, both on my iPhone 3GS and iPad 2.  Sync would get to the final step (sometimes 6, sometimes 7) and then seemingly hang 'Waiting for items to copy'.  I attacked the problem with my iPhone, initially ignoring the iPad.  Went through all the suggested remedies, including a restore to factory settings and restore from backup.  Aborting the sync during the 'Waiting' phase left the iPhone with some events being empty in the Photos app.  I thought the problem might be to do with those photos being corrupted in iPhoto, so removed them.  After that, the sync went fine (although it did still spend 10-20 seconds in the 'Waiting' phase).

I decided to try rebuilding my iPhoto Library to see if that would help, but DO NOT DO THIS!  After nearly three hours, iPhoto (9.2.1) did complete its rebuild, but nearly all of the portrait format photos in the library had been rotated to landscape orientation.  Fortunately, I had saved my old library and could put it back in place.

I then added those events back into iPhoto, and tried a sync with my iPad.  It stuck on 'Waiting for items to copy' for 6 minutes, and I was about to abort it, when suddenly it started reporting 'Copying photo [1,2,3..] of 272', and finished the copy and the sync within a minute.  All events were present in the Photos app. Then did the same thing with my iPhone, and the 'Waiting' phase took 12 minutes, after which it started copying photos and rapidly finished.

My conclusion is that when iTunes displays the 'Waiting' message, it is silently doing something important that takes a long time.  In my case, I'm guessing that it must have been 'Optimizing' the photos (which it used to report explicitly under iOS 4 but no longer reports).  By aborting the 'Waiting' phase, the process of copying the photos was interrupted and I was left with empty events.  So from now on, I'll leave the 'Waiting' phase as long as it takes to finally get on with it and finish whatever it's waiting for.

I left my iPhone hooked up all night and part of the morning while I had the "waiting" indication. It didn't seem like it was ever going to finish whatever it had started. As I've said before here, after trying everything else on this thread, I found success simply by deleting my Voice Memos. After that step, everything worked perfectly. I'm suspecting others are correct in saying it's a corrupted file somewhere. Maybe mine was a Voice Memo while others had bad music, app or photo files. The point is that I'm believing waiting is a losing strategy.

Thanks so much! This problem has been driving me CRAZY for the past few weeks. So glad this fixed it!

Fantastic! It was voice memos to blame for me as well. Many thanks.

I tried what Roger Nuttall suggested but it didnt work for me, so now im doing a complete restore and im not restoring form back-up ill try to back up from icloud, see how it works.

Thank you.

I had the same problem with my new shiney iPhone 4s, and it was driving me crazy! I finally got frustrated and in an attempt to try anything, unchecked all songs. Took all songs off my phone, and then reloaded them and it stopped.

This sounds pretty random and from what I read different things work while others don't. I hope Apple is reading these posts.