Syncing the Apple iPhone 2.0 takes forever!

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
by lepton

Since upgrading my iPhone to OS version 2.0, I’ve noticed it frequently takes much longer to sync with my desktop computer. Where the version 1 software would take a minute or less to sync, assuming there were no movies or huge files to copy over, the new version 2.0 software often takes up to twenty minutes or more!

It seems to be connected to applications. Have you been going through the App Store, downloading the free apps, trying out many, discarding some? Loading and discarding apps seems to trigger a much lengthier “Backing Up” segment of the sync process. And the more apps you have, the longer “Backing Up” takes. I went crazy and have almost a hundreds apps on the phone. Thebacking up process takes quite a long time, and when I install or remove an app, that seems to trigger a long, long backup process as part of the sync. 

One can minimize the length of time it takes to sync by having fewer apps on the phone, and not installing or removing apps very often. But there are so many great apps on the store, and new ones appear all the time crying to be tried out! In addition, in my role as an iPhone software developer, I install my own apps on phones all the time. Simply installing an app takes quite a long time, if you have many apps on the phone.

I think one of the things Apple will be working on for its next system update will be reducing the time it takes to sync the iPhone.

—

No such luck! Since I wrote the above, I’ve had the phone, with the 2.0.2 update, take up to three hours to sync! It’s quite sad. I’m sure Apple will fix it. At some point…

If you take a look in your backup folder for the phone (at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups) you will see that a backup folder can have thousands of file in there, and some of them can be quite big! What’s in there, I’m not sure. Um, backup data. Each application has its own data area and files, and that’s at least part of it..

Something else that can happen during a sync is an install (or update or uninstall) of an application. The system seems to make a sort of “application map” before and after each app is installed, and this can take many seconds if you have a lot of apps installed. This can add up to a lot of time.

During the making-a-backup part of a sync, you can click the little gray “x” button at the right of the status message. Doing this will abandon the backup process and continue with the sync, the much faster process of updating music files and podcasts and such. If you are in a hurry, this gets you going quickly! But you do this at your own risk. What seems to happen, is the abandoned backup is now unusable. If your phone gets wiped out and you have to do a major “Restore”, you won’t be able to use the backup! So if you use this shortcut, let it do an uninterrupted backup next time you sync.

Note that even if you can’t use a backup as I mentioned above, you are not totally hosed if you have to restore. Your music, podcasts, programs, calendars, contacts and many other things are still around on your computer and can be loaded back into your phone. You might check another blog post “Fixing a frozen, zonked, or dead iPhone or iPod Touch” to see what happens during a restore and how to do one.

Will all this be dealt with soon? All we can do is hope! Taking hours to backup is non-good.

Tweet This