We've launched our new website, we would love to hear your thoughts & feedback.

Close X

How To: Stop Backup During iPhone iTunes Sync on 2.0

posted on Jul 14th 2008 at 11:32pm by PatrickJ

iTunesBackup-1

Here’s another very small iPhone tip, but one that may hopefully prove useful for some who are finding iPhone syncing under the new 2.0 software to be unbearably slow.

A big part of how slow the syncs are under 2.0 – at least in my experience so far – is the ‘Backup’ section of things.  I believe one of the reasons for this is that when applications are backed up, it is not only the install files, it is all data associated with every app.  In any case, the backups are taking an awful long time.

So if you want to skip the backup portion of the sync – and greatly reduce the overall length of the whole sync – just hit the little ‘x’ to the right of the top Progress Bar at the top of the iTunes window – next to where it is saying ‘Backing up iPhoneName’ – as shown in the screenshot above.  This will only cancel backup; the rest of the sync will carry on.

Of course it’s not a great idea to cancel out of the backup every time (that’ll come back to bite you for sure), but if you know you’ve already got a recent one (or more) done and are in a hurry, this is a useful quick kill for the backup process.

  • iamse7en

    I haven’t updated to 2.0 yet, but there must be a little haxie to stop this “backup” from occurring every time. Sounds like a freakin’ pain.

    • iphone guest

      I currently have Version 2.2 iphone software and the most current iTunes version, and there's no longer a little X in the corner during backup. Nothing to click! Help, I'm stuck in iPhone backup hell! 4 hours and counting!!!

  • Pingback: Quick Tip: Speed up iPhone sync times (not by disabling backup) | Just Another iPhone Blog

  • Pingback: national family care life insurance

  • Pingback: direct www inter cargo com fresno california salvaged

  • Matt

    i did this and lost all of my music, i dont recommend it

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/patrickj patrickj

      Very sorry to hear you lost music – but I did point out in the post that this is not a good idea to do this all the time, or even when you do not have a recent backup:
      "Of course it’s not a great idea to cancel out of the backup every time (that’ll come back to bite you for sure), but if you know you’ve already got a recent one (or more) done and are in a hurry, this is a useful quick kill for the backup process."