Sync stuck on "waiting for items to copy"

I'd like to keep this thread alive; this problem STILL exists as of Apr 2017 (w/ iTunes 12.6). judysings, thank you for replying to the OP personally, however all the articles you link to are too generic to be of use in solving this specific problem.

Does anyone have any ideas that work? I've tried everything the OP tried, in addition to the "workaround" of modifying a single setting in the Settings section of the iPad sync screen in iTunes, then clicking Apply.

I have a new iPad (10.3.1), connected for the first time to iTunes, and I try to copy about 900 (of my own, not Apple store) items (epub & PDF) from iBooks to the iPad via USB (to read this document, is the sole reason for the existence of this iPad).

iTunes starts copying, the books start to appear on the iPad, and I can open them.

At some point, iTunes goes into the "waiting for items to copy" (I waited over night, nothing happens from this point).

There is now still over 14GB free on the iPad, the books a visible and readable on the iPad, yet still, iTunes is busy:

Waiting for items to copy...

After eight hours of non-activity, I disconnect the iPad, and that causes:

iTunes saying sync failed.

ALL MY EXISTING BOOKS ON THE IPAD GET DELETED! I end up with an empty pad that only contains some Apple Store books I once got, but I am not interested in.

Dear Apple,

* This bug seems to exist for years,

* There has not been a single reasonable suggestion from support

* The error/status message, iTunes gives, is utterly useless and fuzzy. To difficult to say, which item causes the problem?

* Deleting all user data because of not being able to correctly finish the sync, really?

So please, come up with some suggestions how to solve this, and stay with this thread, until you can offer a solution that works for people.

Hi maasailand giraffe,

Welcome to the Support Communities!

First of all, thanks for the detailed notes of the troubleshooting steps you've already tried. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what is going on in your specific case, but I do have a few more ideas for you to try.

Starting with just one of your iPads, when you get stuck on the "waiting for items to copy" step, just disconnect your iPhone. There are probably some orphaned or corrupt files that need to be addressed. I would suggest closing all of your open apps and then backing your iPad up to iCloud. Then review the articles below to move or delete any big files on your device. These can include Voice Memos (iPhone), music, photos on your camera roll, photos or videos that are attached to your Messages, email attachments, etc.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1867

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519

If you need to sync from iTunes, check your settings in the Summary tab to be sure you are only syncing items you have placed a checkmark in front of.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1386

Give this a try on one of your iPads, and hopefully these steps will work for your other devices as well.

Cheers,

Judy

June 2017 and Apple still hasn't either addressed or fixed this issue. To suggest that someone encountering this Apple bug start resetting, restoring, clearing and all sorts of other futile actions is typical of what we as users have to deal with. It is quite simple really, there is a bug in iTunes which causes this problem. The problem will not go away until the developers at Apple fix it.

So I called Apple about this issue and after several attempts, the tech could not get past it. He called it a glitch and said that I should send Apple feedback so they would know to fix it. Since it's been happening for years now, I'm guessing they aren't going to fix it.

On the plus side, her pointed out that the sync screen shows that the iPhone did back up, it just doesn't end cleanly.

I had the same issue: stuck at step 6 of 6 waiting for items...

After an hour, I solved it by going to Music in the left tool bar and checking an unsynched playlist. This immediately prompted iTunes to restart its synching process. It copied over the playlist, cleaned up, and it was done.

My guess is that by adding a new sync task, I "force quit and relaunched" the previous sync process, if you see what I mean. It's worth trying, at any rate.

maasailand giraffe wrote:

Most likely related to this, the "other" category of data stored on the iPads is usually suspiciously high.

How high is suspiciously high? And even without knowing exactly how high it is, you are probably correct. It should be somewhere between 500MB and 2 or 3GB depending on how many apps you have, how many files, and the amount of associated data. If it's higher than that, that could very well be the problem.

From everything that you tried, restoring the devices as new should correct the problem. But if you have done that and the problem keeps resurfacing, I think that you might have something in your iTunes library that is corrupt and when you sync it back, the problem just starts all over again.

Sometimes photos are the culprit. I would start with one iPad and remove all of the photos from it, resync your other content and see what happens.

Not fixed in iOS 8. Though iOS 8 did break wifi syncing for me and others, so I guess it got even worse.

Having problems here with step 7/7, syncing artwork/waiting for items to copy, taking hours and hours. Not letting me backup to iCloud yet, because the restoration still hasn't finished yet.

I'm still waiting for over 2 hours for my phone to sync. It has been like this on and off ever since ios 8 was released. How can I stop this from happening???? Why isn't Apple saying anything??? There are THOUSANDS of posts all over the WORLD and Apple doesn't even apologize. I tried to get help at the apple store, they didn't know anything, total waste of my time. They suggested a full restore: already did that. Try another cable: Did that too. I can't believe how much money I have wasted on a company that no longer cares about it's customers.

None of these articles are of use. It appears that some files become corrupt on the device and then sync'ing doesn't work at all. I am unable to effect any changes to the music on my device. I've attempted to turn off all music, but by device still has 2543 songs on it, even better iTunes tells me I have 9362 at the bottom of the summary screen and 212 in the "on My Device" section under Music. Best guess one or more of the music files on the device is corrupted and iTunes Sync'ing gets stuck and becomes unable to do anything useful at that point. Then the device remains in sync'ing braindead mode until a restore occurs (if you're lucky the restore clears the issue but I've seen it require multiple restores...no rhyme or reason as to why).

Through some combination of incantations, clicking randomly to turn on/off sync'ing, manually deleting music that iTunes refused to remove from the device even though I told it not to sync and music (oh by the way that didn't really work it would start sync'ing indicate it was working and then like magic those would show up again...I finally got it to start copying my music over...it had moved well over 5,000 songs to the device when I got called away. When I returned the computer had gone to sleep and now iTunes is back to "Waiting for items to copy" which makes me think there is an issue with the computer going into deep sleep when only the screen should be going dark. - BTW - I'm running Yosemite but I suspect this may be the issue no matter which version of the OS you are running.

I've gotten around this issue by unclicking all options to automatically move things from iTunes to my devices. Once I changed these settings, the syncs have worked without issue.

Thank you! That did the trick!

Yes, I did something similar. I unchecked "Voice messages" under Music. Then I clicked DONE in the bottom right corner. Answered YES to apply changes. A "new" sync started. Did the trick!