Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
When backing up my iPhone 6 to iTunes on my Macbook I receive the following message."iTunes could not back up the iPhone "iPhone" because an error occurred"
When I watch the progress bar I can see that the backup gets to step 4 of 4 and then fails. It makes no difference if I Transfer Purchases or not as part of the backup. I have deleted previous backups and also have tried to back up to a Windows PC and cannot get past this error. Any ideas?
iPhone 6, iOS 8.3
In viewing the iTunes logs, I've found this entry:
[com.apple.console AppleMobileBackup.exe] ERROR: Backup message response: 101 Unable to open domain directory: No such file or directory (2) at path "/var/mobile/Containers/Shared/AppGroup/B8A3E697-5C70-43B8-B208-211EFD60B8F9" (MBErrorDomain/101)
Any idea what it pertains to or how to get past it?
We've discovered a "null app" on the phone that can't be deleted. Error seems related to this post: "Null" app can't be deleted
So maybe if that person's problem gets resolved, this backup problem will also be resolved.
I had this same problem for weeks now and just today was able to get my "null" app deleted!! This problem was also causing my backups to fail (either to iTunes or to iCloud). I am on a 6 running iOS 8.3.
Go into Settings, General, Usage, Manage Storage. Once there, find the "null" app and at the far right, touch the Right Arrow ">" to take you to the specific App detail screen. There I was able to see some of the details of the app to let me know which one it was (see picture below). In my case, the Blue Infinity logo helped me find it in the iTunes store...under Purchased Apps. Delete the App from this detail screen right now. Then go find it in your list of Purchased Apps and re-install it. Once re-installed I was able to do a backup to my computer...then I was able to delete it completely! Good Luck! Hope this works for you too.
I replied to your help on another thread, but same issue, this worked for me! I could not backup due to "an error" (what a useless iTunes error), but turns out I had TWO "null" state apps, and when I deleted them via the "Manage Storage" screen, I was able to backup without even re-installing the apps!
Thanks a bunch!
Hi,
i must have 20 "null" apps but there is no indication of what they are ? no icon, no name, nothing, even after tapping on them. How can i find which one they are?
ok after some research here is what you have to do to find those null apps when you can t see any name or even an app icon. i had 18 of them ⚠
Repeat the whole process until everything goes.
In my case, there was only one "null" app - but it kept returning, however much I deleted it. Identifying the correct app to reinstall was a nightmare, because it had neither an icon nor a name, until a colleague suggested searching for the version number. I used xcode to search the device log file and sure enough, the version number appeared in a "Removed" log entry. It took a hard reset of the phone however to make the deletion stick. Everything fine now.
I had 2 corrupted apps and identified them by version number. That was Byword and Documents by Riddle. This is old apps, and their version wasn't updated. It was easy to find. After I found them they stuck on downloading. I waited a little bit to be sure they stuck and than deleted them from Settings. This time it helped.
Backup fails at step 4
