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?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
TylersPage.net said 5:51PM on 2-03-2009
Ever since 2.0 came out, my backups have been realllllyyyy sllloooowwwww.... it's never been any faster. i don't know what steve jobs was drinking when he said this.
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TylersPage.net said 5:53PM on 2-03-2009
Huh, what do you know. Right when I posted this I thought, huh, I've got a lot of time on my hands, I might as well back up now. and then all of a sudden it backed itself up in about 20 seconds. Weird!
Howie Isaacks said 6:10PM on 2-03-2009
Mine works very fast. I have the iPhone nearly full, 4 pages of apps, lots of pictures, etc. The backup process takes about 5-10 seconds. No problems here!
Eric said 5:55PM on 2-03-2009
When I go to sleep at night, I plug my iPhone into my MacBook. I have it set to automatically sync when it is connected so now when I wake up and go to work, my iPhone is fully charged and backed up.
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LD said 5:57PM on 2-03-2009
Usually when I back up it takes about an hour. I change almost nothing other than some incremental app data. I don't add music or video except rarely. It's painful. The downside is that I almost never sync with my iTunes, it's simply too much of a hassle.
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essjay said 5:58PM on 2-03-2009
I've got five pages of apps and my iPhone 3g is full to the brim with content. Backups have consistently taken less than 5 minutes since the fix went in some time ago. I typically sync once, maybe twice, a week.
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Paul said 6:01PM on 2-03-2009
It's always taken me only a few seconds to back up my first gen iPhone, even before 2.2. I have three pages of apps, an address book with a couple hundred entries, two email accounts (gmail and exchange), and about 1000 pictures.
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danny bogue said 7:54PM on 2-03-2009
it has normally taken HOURS but ever since the most recent update it has been taking no more than a couple of minutes!
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Tommy said 6:14PM on 2-03-2009
If you haven't updated the Facebook app in a while, do so. I think it was the 2.1 or 2.2 update that had release notes about how the previous version cause REALLY slow backups. I updated the app and ever since then my backups have been the fastest yet (3 minutes max, 6 pages of apps). Try that and see what happens.
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kevin said 10:21PM on 2-03-2009
Yeah, same here. Updating facebook seemed to decrease back-up time for me as well. It seems that the back-up process being slow is more a product of specific apps rather than the firmware as a whole.
Steve said 6:29PM on 2-03-2009
I've got about 20GB of stuff on my 32GB Touch and backup takes less than 30 seconds. I have the newest firmware.
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SYFer said 6:32PM on 2-03-2009
My Gen1 8G has slowed a bit. but is not as slow as it was back a few months ago. To Tommy's observation above, I'm wondering to what extent the backup time is a direct function of the app payload.
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Justin said 6:42PM on 2-03-2009
Quite a bit. Apps that do TV or movie listings, which download a lot of content, increases backup time. If I refresh the data from one of those apps I know my next backup will take longer than normal. So any other program that keeps a large database of more than just high scores could increase backup time.
Steve said 6:30PM on 2-03-2009
(i need to comment to save my password cookie) sorry
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Robert said 6:40PM on 2-03-2009
Articles reporting issues based on perceived anecdotal evidence are always problematic as they are wholly unquantifiable. I am having no problems with regards to speed despite having 4 plus pages of apps and lots of iTunes content as well as myriad other file types/sizes uploaded via Air Sharing.
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heat said 6:48PM on 2-03-2009
iPhone 3G 16 GB. Software Ver. 2.2.1
Audio 8.26 GB
Video 4.16 GB
Photos 139.9 MB
Apps 1.63 GB
Other 356.5 MB
Free 125 MB
Backup time 47 Sec.
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Paul said 6:49PM on 2-03-2009
Here's something that happened this week. Since 2.1 my backups have been super zippy.
This week I accidently ticked a couple of extra items to sync, which of course failed with an error as there was not enough space.
When I backed up my iPhone last night it took almost an hour!
I'm still at 2.2
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NienorGT said 6:53PM on 2-03-2009
I never completed a BackUp.
When I tried, I needed to stop it to go at school, I would say that after 1h30 it was at about 20%.
Even when I emptied every song and videos it was slow as hell.
There is really something wrong on the BackUp system that make it unusable on some situations
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Mandrake said 6:59PM on 2-03-2009
Backups are incremental, but only on a per-app basis.
If an app changes any of it's saved data then next time you do a backup ALL data belonging to that app will be backed up again. If an app does not change any of it's data it is not backed up again.
The biggest offender for me was Facebook 2.0 - it did loads of caching of messages and images as lots of small files (which you could see with iphone backup extractor) and NEVER trimmed down the number of files, so after a few weeks of using the Facebook app there were THOUSANDS of files within the apps private data area causing very long backup times.
Just deleting the Facebook app and restoring it would "fix" it but the slow backups would eventually return as the cache built up. It sounds as though the newer versions of the Facebook app might address this issue by keeping the number of cached files under control.
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Alex said 11:58PM on 2-03-2009
Facebook 2.1 fixed my long backups. My backups were 30min, and I sync every morning, five days a wk, before leaving the house. I do it to get my news podcasts. I have six pages of apps, 16 our 16GB of music, video and pics on the phone.
Ever since fb his 2.1, my backups take less than 45seconds.
There is absolutely no question whatsoever, that this is what has fixed my problem. I suggest updating your fb app ver. fb 2.2 (current) is fine too. I also wonder if there are other such "offender" apps out there.