Syncing Problem

[iFone]

for some reason my 2g ifone takes roughly an hour to back up. i have timed it. after the backup, it doesnt take more than five minutes to sync. i got the ifone the day it came out and i am working on the newest imac. i have about 500 songs, one movie, and 7 full pages of apps. what could be causing it to take this long to backup?

[jhollington]

Are you running the latest iPhone firmware and iTunes 8? The 2.0 firmware was abysmally slow for backups as it would habitually re-backup all of your actual application code in addition to backing up the data.

Between iTunes 8 and the iPhone 2.1 update, the backup performance was dramatically improved by backing up only the data, but this can still be a slow proposition if you're working with applications that cache a lot of data within the app itself. Are your backups slow even if you haven't run any apps? Can you trace it to opening a specific app?

Your actual media content doesn't get backed up by iTunes, since it's presumably already there. The slow backups are either connected to something in your application data or are a function of your existing backups having become corrupted in some way. You can try to solve the latter problem by simply blowing away your existing backups (under the "Devices" tab in your iTunes preferences) and then trying to backup your device again.

[iFone]

i have iTunes 8 but I unfortunately left my ifone @ school so i will have to see if I need an update tomorrow. thanks for the info i will get back to you.

[iFone]

i got my ifone and it says i have the latest software 2.2.1. should i take it into the store to see what the problem is?

[jhollington]

Well, as I suggested above I'd start trying to track down if there's a certain app you're using that is storing a lot of data. Any data stored by applications needs to be backed up, and the iPhone and iTunes have no way of determining what has changed in an app -- they just back up ALL of that application's data if you've even opened it since the last backup.

Keep an eye on which apps you're regularly using between backups, and see if you can narrow it down to which app may be causing your backups to take a long time.

[iFone]

there arent any besides racing live which is all on their server. i love to judge on leaf trombone but i don't think that is the app. besides that, there arent many apps that i use regularly.