Got time to spare? Back up your iPhone

Drip, drip, drip. It seems like a lot of people are getting very s l o o o w backups when syncing their iPhones again. This was a major complaint with older versions of the firmware, but most of those problems seemed to disappear when version 2.1 and 2.2 came out. Now with 2.2.1 Apple support boards are hearing from a lot of steamed users wondering why the backup process is taking many minutes, or in some cases, hours.

It's hard to believe the backup process is incremental. I backed up yesterday, then again today. Both backups took almost 30 minutes. I only have about 20 images on the phone, and 4 pages of apps. An incremental backup should make short work of that process, but it crawls along like it's doing something really important. Maybe it is, but it really shouldn't take this long to do a simple update of the data.

Yes, you can kill any backup, but then you have no backup. What's the sense of that? A wise iPhone user will not start a backup of their phone right before leaving to catch an important flight, that's for sure.

How have your experiences with iPhone backups been lately?

How fast are your iPhone backups?
Lickity split	1774 (32.2%)
Seems as fast or slow as always	1864 (33.9%)
It is really, really slow	1867 (33.9%)

View Tags

Drip, drip, drip. It seems like a lot of people are getting very s l o o o w backups when syncing their iPhones again. This was a major...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

59 Comments

Filter by:

andy d

my iphone was taking hours to backup and i mean hours....6 hours and still only 3/4 into it..so i deleted facebook and cleared the appsniper app with the new cache clean it has with it and yep that did the trick only took 10-15 mins..hope this helps others out there...

March 08 2009 at 8:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

amb@home

my backups were always really slow 16g 1st gen iphone (filled to the max), now they fly by...

i stopped updating apps from the phone.

February 07 2009 at 12:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mrmoo

I have a 1st generation iPod touch and the backups are fast. In 2.0.2 I had a lot of problems with everything. But 2.1 fixed it all

February 06 2009 at 12:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Paul

Something changed at some point... and now I am just flying through my sync's.

I am now running 2.2.1 and were as before it took between 4-5 MINUTES to back up and sync... now it is taking on average around 9-15 seconds. That's back up, and sync in 15 seconds.

I have the 16gig model, and have less than 4gigs free (Yeah... WAY to many movies, I know!!)

: )

February 06 2009 at 11:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Colin

My backups were taking 1/2 hour-1 hour before crashing, but I discovered that a certain application (Mint.com, I think) was at the heart of the slowness. I uninstalled it and now backups take mere minutes.

February 05 2009 at 3:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Zombie Flanders

Can someone also explain why OS X is unbelievably slow with USB thumb drives too? Why can data to a thumb drive in seconds on XP/Vista/7 yet it takes the same files minutes to move on OS X??? This is incredibly frustrating and totally negates the value as the USB thumb drive as a quick and easy way to transfer files!!!

February 04 2009 at 7:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

AndrewG

As everyone else has said,

IT'S FACEBOOK!

Maybe Myspace or other apps that store a lot of data but it was mainly Facebook for all my friends that complain to me how long it takes them to backup.

February 04 2009 at 4:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bitgod

AARRGGGHH, god yes. I just did a backup on my 2.2 phone last night, 8 pages of junk, and it took over 2 hours. Good thing I don't do it often. :P

February 04 2009 at 3:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

marty

Used to be quick, then got super-slow. They updated to 2.1 and everything got quick again. Now on the latest firmware, it's horribly slow (literally hours), and I'm sure it's a single app that's causing it. Trouble is, this backup stuff all happens in the background so you can't tell which one is the troublemaker. I've deleted the old backups, deleted the Facebook app, etc. but no joy. As I mentioned before, the slow back up thing was a problem, but it got fixed somehow, and now it's appeared again, so something is odd.

February 04 2009 at 12:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ben Willis

I never completed a back up of my iPod touch because it just took too long! My iPod spontaneously restored one day a few weeks ago and I lost a bunch of apps and music that I had payed for, but not yet synced with my computer. I still have figured out how to get that stuff back without paying for it again. Any suggestions? Should I call Apple or something?

February 04 2009 at 12:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply