Ever since the 2.0 firmware was released, it takes about twenty or thirty minutes to sync my iPhone to my Mac. Copying over songs, podcasts, and photos seems to take about as long as it ever did, but at the very beginning of the process, a mysterious procedure, described by iTunes as “Backing up ‘Joel’s iPhone’”, goes on for ages. The only thing I can think that might take that long were if iTunes were making an image of my iPhone’s entire contents, including the operating system, every single time it syncs.
I can cancel the “Backing up” portion by clicking the small X next to the phrase in iTunes, but it has to be done every time I sync. It’s crazy.
Mine is the same, and is very laggy, especially while using the keyboard. The amount that I have to reboot it or hold home for a six count is reminding me of why I ditched WinMob.
iTunes is a piece of crap. It takes forever just to load songs onto my iPod. I switched to Anapod Explorer, which was better, but now I got a new computer and even though I paid for Anapod, I can’t move it to my new computer and they don’t respond to e-mails.
Does anybody have any recommendations? I don’t care about whistles and bells, I just want to get songs and videos from my computer to my iPod in the minimum amount of time.
Poddox is too slow, also.
My iPhone never takes so long, perhaps because I am on a PC? *wink*
Look into your issue further. I have never experienced inordinate load time unless I am completely reinstalling my iPhone.
I don’t want to have to sign it to give this feedback but I had the exact same problem with my iPod, it turns out it was my photos that were making it take so long.
I suggest that you try turning off synching up photos to the iphone and test my theory.
The fix was to wipe the photo cache and re synch after I had “broken” the relationship.
I hope this helps.
Just saw this on lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/399419/turn-off-crash-reports-to-speed-up-iphone-sync
You can turn off the auto-backup through terminal
http://gizmodo.com/5029121/how-to-disable-iphones-backup-process
Odd. It takes me less than a minute to sync, using a not-especially-fast G5 iMac. The “backing up” part lasts about 15 seconds.
Joel, I also have the problem you describe. And, in light of my own experiences from the past few weeks, I would strongly recommend that you let the backup complete every so often.
After the iPhone 2.0 upgrade, my phone became extremely unstable, crashing in one form or another about 5-10 times a day. As if this weren’t bad enough, I frequently experienced lag while using the keyboard, seriously impacting its functionality. There were also abnormalities with iTunes during the syncing process, which would frequently report errors in the “sync service,” whatever that is.
I decided to restore my iPhone. I let the backup run to completion and restored the phone. After a few nerve-wracking errors, the restore completed. However, when it came time to restore the backed-up files, containing all my settings, state, and some 500 photos, iTunes reported that my backup was corrupt or incompatible. It seems that the upgrade to iPhone 2.0 causes previous backup images to be deleted. I am still trying to figure out whether I can save any of the data, and fortunately I still have my contacts, but I am basically starting over.
I have never jailbroken my phone or mistreated it in any way, and I know I am not the only person having trouble with the new software. I am furious at Apple for releasing such crappy, buggy software – this has already cost me hours of time, and the waste is sure to continue. Does anybody know of any way to extract data from iTunes’ iPhone backups?
The link in #5 (and on other blogs) is spot-on. The problem isn’t the backups — it’s the crash reporting that iTunes is sending back to Apple’s servers, which are overloading from too many crash reports coming in. These crash reports do not include identifiable personal data about your specific iPhone (supposedly).
If you follow the steps outlined to turn off crash reporting, you will NOT turn off your actual backups. You just speed them up.
My backups are wonderful now. Highly recommended!
Try the Copy Purchased Items option (or whatever it’s called). I had a bunch of games I’d installed over WiFi which I think iTunes was backing up since they weren’t in the Applications list on my PC.
Backup still takes too long, but it’s MUCH faster now…
#4(Anonymous) is on to something: The trick is to NOT have the “iTunes Sync photos from:” folder be your “My Documents” or “My Pictures” folder.
iTunes seems to index every photo it can find in this folder and sub folders even though you are only asking it to sync one or two sub folder(s).
I am into time-lapse photography and a direct result of that I have over 120,000 photos in my “My Photos” folder.
The solution is to create a special folder that only contains sub folders that you are likely to want to sync to your Iphone/iPod Touch. As an added measure I keep the originals in “My Pictures” and create smaller (1600×1200 or 800×600) copies in this “iPod Photos” folder.
#2 Moon – Anapod is just ONE way to move stuff back and forth betweeen istuff and pc. Winamp can do it as well, however it doesn’t seem to handle synching other things along with it, just music. There are others but this should help for the time being, and if not, google is your friend.
here’s the solution:
you don’t really need to disable backups:
it’s a setting you chose when you first set up your iphone which does not normally pop up again. Here is the simple guide resolving the real issue, and making your backups take about 90 seconds on average.
the thing that’s making everyone’s backup take an hour plus is that your sending your crash reports to apple everytime you backup
to prevent long delays in the backup process (it’s NOT due to Apps, it’s due to sending long, long, really long, log files of errors/debugging info, very, very, slowly,to Apple it seems for many users at least, including myself with over 18 apps)
If it starts to sync stop it right away by clicking the x (top middle of itunes). Then go to devices click your iphone so the middle window displays the iphone info and uncheck the “automatically sync when this iphone is connected” you’ll find it under the summary tab of your iphone if you’re not already there.
Then unplug and re-plug your phone back in.
in itunes, right click on your iphone
select ‘reset warnings’
click on sync
you will then see a dialog box indicating:
“Your iPhone contains diagnostic information which may help Apple…..etc…”
click on the check box “do not ask me again” (so that this should be permanent, you won’t have to do this again, unless you click on ‘reset warnings’ another time, etc…)
(if you click on ‘Show Details” the computer should open the directory containing all the error logs, I wouldn’t delete them, but perhaps you could even flush these out by deleting, but I’m not sure what if any risks that could cause)
Here is the solution:
click on ‘Don’t Send’
That’s it!
enjoy a nice fast backup, and a nice fast sync, all within about 2 minutes, if fully loaded for it all to finish.
Just like Mac OS X, the iPhone generates crash reports when things go wrong. These files are sent back to your computer whenever the iPhone is connected and synchronized with iTunes. In Mac OS X, they’re located in /Library/Logs/Crashreporter/MobileDevice/
You might find a variety of files here with different prefixes that end in .crash. For instance, files that start with:
“Maps†indicate a crash in the Google Maps application
“MobileSafari†indicate a crash in Safari for iPhone
I found I have about 415 files in there, that’s about 11MB it’s trying to send to Apple, each and every time, but no more!
What a coincidence! We bitch about iTunes, and Apple releases 7.7.1
Lets see if they actually fixed anything!
A word of warning:
I tried 7.7.1.11, and it refused to acknowledge the existence of my iPod Touch, and one of my data volumes went missing. Some message about not being able to find a USB driver. Returning to 7.7.0.43 did not fix anything. I had to revert to yesterday’s registry to get my ability to sync and drive back.
Yeesh!
I disabled sending error logs and it still takes forever to backup.
iTunes will continue to ask you to backup until you allow it to backup.
From there you should only see these slow backups after significant changes have been made to the phone or to the SyncServices folder on your computer (where the sync information is stored). So, if you reset the sync history then you can expect another long backup. Incidentally, iTunes still backs up the phone during every first sync (with real info to sync) after being connected to the computer – this is the sync that gets re-written over and over and the long sync is the one that remains.
And FYI, this glacial backup is due to the countless iPhone owners who never synced and backed up their phone because “the didn’t know they were supposed to.” After countless customers losing info due to plain ignorance, Apple decided to make full backups mandatory to ensure that those who need to be spoon fed are well taken care of.
Don’t worry though, a reliable source told me that Apple is working on speeding up the process, but until then, thank the people who we need to spoon feed or else they’d do something stupid like stick a finger in an electrical outlet, or light a cigarette while pumping gas :-S
Run iSync and Reset Sync History:
My iPhone started taking two hours to backup each time I synched. I read the comments here and elsewhere and tried turning off crash reporting, etc. with no effect.
Talking with Heather at Apple iPhone support, she instructed me to run iSync (in applications) and under preferences select “Reset Sync History”.
This immediately reduced the backup time from two hours to six minutes.
I hope that this information will speed the synching process for other people here.
i recommend using cucosoft to extract files from anyones ipod and put them on yours. it costs a few dollars but has saved me all the trouble from even having to call apple after my hardrive on my laptop crashed i would have had to download and refind the whole 600 songs on my ipod but this way it took around 30 minutes, and works wonderfully to get songs from others ipods/iphones