[cana]

It annoys me that the apple faithfull are so quick to ignore the fact that this 'feature' is an issue and make silly commnets like "why are you plugging it into your computer anyway" ... It's designed to be plugged into the computer, thats why !
I was very quick to dismiss the first iphone as a serious contender for my pocket mainly due to its lack of features when compared to other handheld devices on the market, but when my o2 atom life died on me and was sent to the supplier for repairs it sped up my search for a new phone. I had the 3g in my hands within 2 days of the lauch and i must admit everything just works well, and fast, and i couldn't be happier, but this backup thing is a real pain.
Hopefully apple can fix this asap, i can't imagine it would be too difficult for them to write into the next itunes an option where we can select to only do manual backups, or tick a box to say 'do not back up this device if it has been backed up in the last X days"
C

[pdmarsh]

I agree that it needs to be fixed. My comment was to suggest a viable alternative pending the update from Apple.

[jay44444444]

Wonder if those with short backup times have had better luck with restore. Maybe 1 -2 hr backup times are a sign of corruption?

[whshep]

jay44444444 said:

Wonder if those with short backup times have had better luck with restore. Maybe 1 -2 hr backup times are a sign of corruption?

I'm getting 2-3 hour backups even after a complete restore. Plus I had to reinstall all apps after the restore?that part of the backup didn't work (setting were restored, however).

Whatever the problem is, a fresh restore doesn't fix it.

[sheilanolan]

My back ups are not quite as slow as that. What I have found out is that calendar events on my iphone are not synching to Outlook 2007 but they do work going from my laptop to my iphone. This seems to be a problem everyone is having and as it's a major problem I hope Apple sorts it out soon as I'm getting fed up with having to manually transfer the data at the end of each day. The whole point of my buying Outlook was so that I didn't have to do that!!!

[costmo]

I too am troubled/affected by the lengthy backup issue. Well over 2 hours for me, with only about 30 custom apps (and 12 GB of total space used) :-(
This is true for Mac users, at least. I am not sure about Windows users... You can click the "x" in the circle that's off to the right of the box when it tells you that it's backing up. It will still perform the remainder of the sync (new tunes, podcasts, etc.), it just skips the backup step.
I am perplexed as to why it would take so long. I can transfer 16GB over USB 2.0 in under 15 minutes. It seems that a full backup of 16 GB on a device shouldn't take longer than transferring the same amount of data over a similar link.
Additionally, they could use Unix rsync behind the scenes to backup only what has changed since the last backup to save a significant amount of time. That's sort of one of the good ideas of having a Unix backend system.
I was part of the early release developer program, and the backup process never took this long on a 2G iPhone during the beta period. I haven't paid attention to the length of time that the old 2G device takes to backup now that the App Store has gone public (and my wife has my old phone).
Hoping that Apple releases some fix for this soon...

[dolphinbuddy]

The backups of my 3g iPhone are taking FOR-EV-ER! I haven't timed it, but I wouldn't be surprised if I have that 2 hours beat.
It makes me mad because sometimes I plug it in to sync my podcasts and go do something else for a minute, only to come back and see that I forgot to cancel the backup, and my phone isn't ready for my listening pleasure.
WTF!

[pminich]

It seems like a fair number of people having problems with back ups have a decent number of apps installed, in some cases 30+. I have 12 apps, my wife's phone has 2 apps (both 2G) and we are not experiencing any issues.

It would be interesting to see a listing of apps installed on phones with long backup issues to see if there is any correlation between specific apps or the number of apps and those experiencing this problem.

[trekker10000]

I only have 4 apps installed that I bought and it's taking over 2 hours to backup. I deleted them as a test and it still taook over 2 hours to backup with no apps installed. So I re-added them since it didn't seem to matter, So it doesn't seem like its the number of apps installed that's causing the problem.

[costmo]

I don't think the number of Apps is the issue, but I could be wrong. I have 26 Apps and my backup takes 2.25 hours. It didn't take quite that long, but it was still about 1.5 hours when I had 9 apps installed. It's possible that it is the particular apps that are installed, but I am more likely to blame something with the new device.

My wife has my old 2G phone, so I am going to plug hers in to get a backup when she's not using the phone some time and I'll report back on how long it takes. We have all of the same apps installed, so if it's a problem with the apps, It should show up on her phone also.

[pminich]

I think that I assumed that this was an issue with both versions of the phone so it was related to the software update.

Anyone care to say if they have 2G or 3G phones with problems?

[costmo]

Still no opportunity to test the 2G device, but I am a member of the developer program, so I submitted a bug report on this issue to Apple, and here was the response I got:

"This is a follow up to Bug ID# 6092390. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 6000891. The original bug number being used to track this duplicate issue can be found in the State column, in this format: Duplicate/OrigBug#.
If you have any additional questions related to this bug or wish to check on status of the original issue, please update this bug report or send an email to <removedfornda>, referencing your Bug ID# 6092390.
Thank you for submitting this bug report. We truly appreciate your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs. "

At least Apple's aware of it and there's some hope os a solution.

[griffman]

It happens on both generations of phones. Today, I let a full backup run, and kept an eye on the backup folder in the Finder. (You'll find the backups in your user's Library -> Application Support -> MobileSync -> Backup folder.)

Based on what I saw, I'm guessing that this problem is related to how poorly the Mac OS seems to handle copying lots of small files. The backup folder that was created today was 498.5MB in total size, but it contains a whopping 7,956 files. The full backup took 4.5 hours to run -- yes, over half a workday to run one single backup of my phone!!

Doing the math, on average the backup process transferred 111MB per hour, or .03MB/second. To put that in perspective, a SATA hard drive might be capable of (maximum) transfer rates in the range of 250MB to 300MB per second, which is roughly 8,333 times faster than the speeds I was seeing.

At one point, while I was watching the backup (using the Inspector window which shows both file count and total folder size), the write rate was abysmal. It took six minutes to back up 78 files, which totaled a whopping 312KB -- that's a data transfer rate of .000866MB/sec!

Clearly there's something about this process that's just not working correctly; hopefully it's patched in the 2.0.1 update that we all assume will be released at some point in the near future. There's just no reason a backup of 500MB of data should take anything more than a few minutes.

-rob.

[sheilanolan]

Looking at all these posts on long backup times, I wonder if it is a Mac thing? I'm using Windows and my backup times are normally less than 2 minutes. I have noticed a slight slowing with larger apps but nothing like everyone else is getting.