Can't back up iPhone 4s. "Not Enought Free Space" message.

ok, so this thread is old, but obviously people are still having problems and I've finally discovered the root cause. Too bad Apple wouldn't spend the necessary time to provide a solution to people or fix their bugs.

Root cause:

Disk space reported by Finder...Get Info does not report available physical disk space. Finder does not include items such as local snapshots as they supposedly would manage the local snapshot space for us. Unfortunately they don't manage it correctly. Although finder says you have free space, you really don't. It's all tied up in local snapshots. To prove this, go to About this Mac...Storage...and look at Free Space. That's your real free space. You also see on the graph how much space is taken by "backups", it's significant likely.

Since the freakin OS won't correctly manage it, we need to clean it up...

Just follow the instructions here:

http://jonathanadaley.com/post/81410190765/delete-local-snapshots-backups-osx

This solved my problem. I hope it will save you from wasting an entire evening like I did.

I can't speak to any negative side effects of doing this, but it seems reasonable to me and it got me passed this annoying problem.

PS - On a side note, someone else mentioned copying a very large file to your laptop and that fixing the problem. Interestingly this probably forces the local snapshots to be deleted (because that's what it's suppose to do) and "fixes" the problem in a round about manner.

Lastly, this is really probably an underlying bug in iTunes in that they are incorrectly determining disk space by looking at physical space rather than the logical space that Finder uses. It doesn't even try to write the backup file, it just checks disk spaces and incorrectly errors out. The code should be updated to look at logical, not physical free disk space.

Apple, feel free to send me an iTunes credit for all the work I just did for you.

You aren't addressing Apple when you post on this forum, just users like you. If you want to contact Apple, use the Contact Us links at the bottom of each page of this forum. If you want to send them feedback, use this link: http://www.apple.com/feedback

Natrops,

Thanks for the analysis and well-written instructions! My "MusicMac" (which we use to sync our iPhones and iPads too) is running Snow Leopard, so I wasn't able to see the Storage graphs, or run the tmutil command to actually try out your solution. But I will keep it on hand for when I upgrade to a computer that will actually run Mavericks and Yosemite. If your solution is correct, it is indeed something Apple should have posted. Hope they at least give you that big iTunes gift card reward.

P.S. to AmishCake: I'm betting there are some Apple employees tasked with reading these forums.

the-design-guy wrote:

Natrops,

Thanks for the analysis and well-written instructions! My "MusicMac" (which we use to sync our iPhones and iPads too) is running Snow Leopard, so I wasn't able to see the Storage graphs, or run the tmutil command to actually try out your solution. But I will keep it on hand for when I upgrade to a computer that will actually run Mavericks and Yosemite. If your solution is correct, it is indeed something Apple should have posted. Hope they at least give you that big iTunes gift card reward.

P.S. to AmishCake: I'm betting there are some Apple employees tasked with reading these forums.

There are NO APPLE here in this forum. Go back and read the term of use of this forum.

Okay so this thread is 2.5 years old and clearly there's no one solution.

None of what is suggested in this post and other threads work for me.

Since Oct/Nov 2014 I can't backup my iPhone to computer.

I've tried:

* Turning off / on my iPhone

* Turning off / on my Computer

* Upgrading the iOS on the phone

* Upgrading the iTunes version

* Updating ( or rather staying up to date with ) the latest OS for my Macbook Pro ( 2010 )

* Freeing up Space ( I have over 100GB free )

* Deleting historical Backups

* Changing the permissions on the mobilesync and back up folders

* Deleting and recreating the backup folder

* Turning off Time Machine Snapshots and re-turning it on

Anyone got any other suggestions?

Note I don't have the time/energy at the moment to format and rebuild the Macbook, which I consider a last resort anyways.

It might be helpful to tell us what happens when you try to back up. Do you get any error messages? How much free space is on your hard drive?

Sorry, original post called that out but you're right the more info the better.

When I try backing up to computer I get the following Error Message:

"iTunes could not back up the iPhone <name here> because there is not enough free space on this computer to save the backup. Removing files and emptying the Recycle Bin will Free up additional space."

I have 142 GB of free space on my Macbook Pro (2010)

My trash can is empty.

I've just tried to associate my phone with my work laptop ( Windows 7 machine ) and I get the same error message.

It has 350+ GB free.

Now the fact that I'm seeing it on a different computer/OS...

I'm wondering if it's a particular app on my phone that's causing the issue!!

Could a Single App, or rather it's Sandbox cause iTunes to be unable to back it up?

I use the App "Everyday" which prompts you to take a photo of yourself every day. I've been doing this for 2.5 years ( not literally everyday but 90% of the time )

That must be a large image gallery by now

I'll try archive the photo's off/out and remove them... see if that works.

I've had this issue twice in the past several days.

The 1st time, I noticed that with my phone plugged in, there were a bunch of apps in the trash. I emptied he trash, then the backup worked.

The 2nd time, I changed the usb cable, and also which port it was plugged into (don't know which one helped) That solved the issue for me too.

I have a problem with not enough space on my laptop for the restore but I think I figured it out. I don't know if this may be the case on your computer, but I found that the hard drive/partition that my iTunes is installed on didn't have enough memory—apparently I need enough space that practically equals the size of my 64 GB iPhone.

I had to restore my iPhone to factory settings. But I wanted to restore my backup which it didn't let me because of the memory problem.

What I did was do the restore from an empty hard drive on a different computer. First, you need to find the location of your backup. It resides somewhere in the Apple Computer folder under MobileSync then under Backup. The folder is labelled with a bunch of numbers and letters. It's either in Application Data, AppData/Roaming (hidden folders).

Copy that folder on an external drive.

On the other computer, set up a new user profile. Then, move the user folder for that profile from the memory deficient hard drive to the new partition (if you're setting up a new profile on a computer with lots of space, you can skip this part). This site tells you how to do it: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/87555-user-profile-change-default-location. html

Install iTunes on that new computer and it should put the applicable files into user folder for that profile (newly moved user profile if you moved it to an empty hard drive).

Open iTunes and it will force you to sync your phone. Close iTunes. You should be able to find the Backup again and the file folder should have the same name as the one you copied. Delete the new one and replace it with the old one.

Open iTunes and you should be able to restore from the backup.

It took some time because I have the 4S, but my phone has all the contacts and settings, etc. Two weeks old since that was when I backed it up, but restored nonetheless.

I have an iPhone 4S 16gb and experienced the same issue with about 13gb of backups in the MobileSync/Backup folder and only about 6gb free on my phone. My Macbook hard drive has about 73gb free so made no sense to me and I couldn't a fix online. The helpful suggestion featured at the top of the page is a dead link. I tried restarting my laptop, SMC reset, PRAM reset, hard resetting my phone twice with all apps closed, reconnecting with my external hard drive unplugged, and my iTunes is up-to-date.

I thought I'd take the advice of renaming or deleting backups in a different direction; I just moved the old backups from the MobileSync/Backups folder to MobileSync using command+C and command+option+V to move instead of copy and paste and put your admin password in. I restarted iTunes and my iPhone backed up fine after that. Hope this helps people.

Thanks ! This exactly solved my problem and also helped me find another place to look for in order to unlock more HDD space!

Todd,

This did the trick for me; thank you for posting the command line details. For others experiencing this issue, but with little or no "Terminal" experience, check out the "man" pages in Terminal for the 'tar' and 'rm' commands (e.g., man tar).

-fjl

Can you please explain this as if you were speaking to my 10 year old daughter... I am not tech savvy at all... and I am having this same issue... I have to send back replacement phone in 10 days so I hope you can help! Sorry to sound like such an idiot...

My single backup folder in this location contained over 6,000 individual files.all with the same date.

moved all to trash.

Did't even need to restart iTunes . Backup executed correctly.

Thank you for the info on where to look.

Hi all,

I am really hoping someone can help me. I have been with Apple Support for over 42 days, and they finally said "when you upgrade to iOS10 your issues will be solved." Eh. Didn't happen.

Tech specs:

iPhone6S, 128GB version

I have two laptops, a Macbook pro, current model, running Yosemite

A Windows 7 machine, with nothing on it but iTunes and Chrome

1TB of purchased space on iCloud

TimeMachine installed/working on the mac, not the Windows obviously.

I had the issue on iOS9 (all versions from 9.1 onward), and now on iOS10 too.

Problem:

-Whenever I run a backup to iTunes I get the notorious "not enough space" message. However, I have 600 GB free. I *did* run through the TimeMachine instructions to release space.

-When I back up to iCloud, I get "This backup could not be completed" with no further information.

Apple had me delete all backups as part of the problem (duh, stupid me actually did it)... so now I have no backup to restore from.

Apple had me log everything, run backups, send the logs, delete apps they thought were causing the issue, re-run backups etc for about 3 weeks, every 2 days calling me. Eventually they said "when iOS10 is out, upgrade and it will fix it." I did that last night, same issue.

It is NOT a disk space problem. The "your OS is corrupt" theory doesnt hold true now that the iOS is gone.

This is a work critical phone with 33 email accounts that are all mission critical, all that will need to be manually reconfigured and so on, without having SOME solution here.

Help!