For the last two weeks, I've been participating in two threads on Apple's support forums. Like many of the users there, I saw the backup time for my iPhone go from a few minutes to over two hours. This is completely unacceptable, and I've been meaning to write about it, but simply haven't had the time. Now I do.

To be clear, the "backup" of the iPhone comes before the synchronization of your contacts, calendar, music, video, photos, and other items that were all part of the previous 2.5G iPhone running firmware 1.0 through 1.1.4. First, the backup runs, and creates, well, a backup of your device's applications and all their settings. This backup is used to restore the iPhone if it should be necessary at some point in the future.

Here is what I found...

Running firmware 2.0 and iTunes 7.7, my backups went from a few minutes to almost 2.5-hours right around the time that I hit the 15-applications-installed mark. From what other users are reporting, it seems to have less to do with the number of applications installed, and more to do with the total size of all installed apps (talking phrasebooks, for example, are giving lots of users trouble because they are very large apps).

iTunes 7.7.1 was release last week, so I upgraded. I noticed that my backups went from over two hours to just under 15-minutes. I thought Apple had fixed the problem. Frankly, a 15-minute backup is still slightly insane, in my opinion, but, compared with over two hours, it was a blessing.

The catch, at least for me, is this: If the backup process is canceled, for any reason, corruption seems to occur, and the next backup will take over two hours. After a good backup, the time to complete another backup is significantly less. This is because backups are supposed to be incremental, and they are, provided that corruption doesn't occur.

Another user posting to one of the discussion threads pointed out that the backup process modifies (creates and/or replaces) files in the "MobileSync" directory on the desktop. For Mac users, this directory is located at...

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Inside the "Backup" folder, there is a folder with a hash name (seemingly random numbers and letters). This is actually the device ID for the iPhone itself.

When I looked in my folder, I saw 5542 files, all ending in ".mdbackup", except for three others, named Info.plist, Manifest.plist, and Status.plist. I sorted these files by Date Modified during a rather long backup, and noticed that almost every one was being recreated as the process moved forward. This was not an incremental backup, and files are created at a rate of about 1.54 files per second. As one can imagine, this takes a long time.

After that initial backup with iTunes 7.7.1, subsequent backups took only a few minutes, as mentioned above, and the files inside this folder were mostly left alone, with only a few hundred replaced during the backup process. Obviously, the number of files replaced/recreated will depend on two variables: (1) the length of time since the last backup, and (2) the number of changes made to the files being backed up (which will require these changes to be copied over during the backup process).

So everything is great now, right? For me, more or less, it's manageable. I can deal with it, for now. For other users, neither the iTunes 7.7.1 nor iPhone firmware 2.0.1 updates have helped at all. For these users, backups are still taking hours, and many of them are waiting longer than I ever did for a backup to complete.

I've found that there is one mandatory rule when performing a sync of my iPhone. It must be in airplane mode. Why, you ask? Well, if you cancel the backup, for any reason, the next backup is going to be a full backup, not incremental. This means hours wasted waiting for iTunes to do its thing. What cancels a backup? Well, a phone call, for sure, will cancel it and cause corruption. Also, clicking the little X in iTunes (to the right of "Backing up..." when a backup is running), or sliding-to-cancel on the iPhone itself, during a backup, will cancel it, and cause the same problem.

Irritating? Absolutely.

Some users have been suggesting the disabling of iPhone backups. Synchronization of data (calendar, contacts, music, video, photos, etc.) will still take place if this is done, but I think it's a terrible idea. What happens if you use an application like eWallet that stores valuable passwords and other confidential information? That data is gone if you have to restore your iPhone. What about a budgeting application that tracks your expenses? Gone. But, for those who wish to disable backups, the link is below.

» Disable iPhone Backups on Mac and Windows

I've never been this frustrated with any Apple product since 2005 when I made the switch and started buying just about everything Apple put in front of me. I love their products because they are both powerful and easy-to-use. No other developer, in my opinion, has been able to bring these two normally opposing benefits together so seamlessly. But Apple needs to get its act together with the iPhone. I'm telling friends to hold off on buying the new iPhone, or to wait for firmware 2.1 before even considering an upgrade of the previous iPhone model from firmware 1.1.4. Firmware 2.0 simply was not ready for primetime. Far too many users are having far too many problems, and we're only talking about long backup times here. I haven't had to restore my iPhone yet, but others are reporting that it's hit or miss when it comes to restoring, causing many users to abandon the process and start over (many having to do so several times since purchasing their new iPhones or upgrade the firmware on their old ones).

Apple, please get this straightened out. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt, once in a while, to visit your own discussion forums and maybe post a message or two stating that you know about the issues and are working on them. It makes us all feel a lot better to know that Apple cares and is working on a solution for us. Frankly, you've ignored us publicly, and we're not happy with you right now.

Below are the two Apple discussion threads I referenced above.

» Backup of iPhone takes around 2 hours!
» "Backup" is *EXTREMELY* slow (iPhone 3G)...