Q: itunes could not back up your iphone because an error occurred

I am using an iPhone 4 running iOS 7.1.2 and am trying to back up the device onto a Window 7 pro (64bit) (4GB RAM, Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU) machine using iTunes 12.0.1.26 using the USB connection. iTunes and iOS are currently up to date. There are a few (less than a month's) updates outstanding for Windows. When I try to back up the iPhone, iTunes gives the following error: 'iTunes could not back up the iPhone "Mike's iPhone" because an error occurred'. Hmm ... no error code! So, I searched on the Internet for solutions or even for potential problems. I have deleted all of the photos on the iPhone. I rebooted the iPhone and PC. I am not using a USB hub. I tried disconnecting from the Internet and disabling all anti-virus software. The iPhone is not jail-broken. I tried backing the iPhone up using an old PC running Windows XP pro, with a fresh installation of iTunes. I still got the same error message. So, I tried installing CopyTrans Shelbee version 1.013 software for managing iPhone backups. This also gave me an error message, albeit a somewhat cryptic one: 'Your device returned an unknown error (open_dprotected_np error: Too many levels of symbolic links (62) at path "/var/mobile/Applications/28EF45E0-435A-4777-823F-8E286739B7ED/Documents/Locati onToCoreData.sqlite" )'. Has anyone had anything similar or have any idea how I might get around the problem? From the Shelbee error message, it looks as though the iPhone itself is having a problem generating the information for the backup rather than the PC application having problems making sense of that information. Failing any solution with iTunes or Shelbee, are there any other backup solutions I might try?