Why your backups are so slow and what you can do about it.

Question

So you know your backup us slow and want to know what's wrong.
Here it is:
1) Transferring files from the iPad to your computer happens at an unacceptably slow rate of ~100 KBytes per second, even though it is connected via USB2. (You are using a USB2 port, right?)
2) The iPad/iTunes backup process introduces a multiple second pause between each and every file that gets backed up. Ugh!
As bad as problem #1 is, it's really problem #2 that is causing everyone serious problems.
Here's what happens: Some applications create many very small files. The free NPR app is one. If you have lots of photos, that can be another. When you back up these tiny files, even though they may be only 1 KB in size, they can take up to 5 seconds each to transfer. In the case of NPR, each jpeg is stored separately and is backed up separately. If you have 500 jpegs, each one is only 2K in size, but there is a 5 second lag between files, you have to wait an extra 2500 seconds (41 minutes!) to back up that 1 megabyte of data.
Why this lag between files? Only Apple knows for sure. My guess is that it is due to the creation of the metafiles sent to the computer during the backup process. If the iPad is generating the metadata as an actual file in flash, the delays might be caused by read-modify-write cycles in flash. I want to say to Apple, why hasn't this been fixed? This problem is obvious to anyone who bothers to take a close look at the backup process. I can't believe they don't know about it. Do you really need so much of a lag between transmitting files? But I digress.
The real question is, what to do about it? The answer is that you have 3 choices:
1) Do nothing and live with it.
2) Turn off backups. There are several apps out there that can do this, just Google it.
3) Figure out which applications are guilty of producing large numbers of files and can them.
To go about #3, get a copy of AppleSlowBackupLiveView from http://files.m4ko.de/applesync/
Start a backup, figure out what folder the backup is being written to, then paste that folder into AppleSlowBackupLiveView and hit the "Check This Backup" program.
Each time a new file is being backed up a new line will appear. If you see the same application appearing over and over and over again, you know that this application is partly to blame. You can hit the Remove Duplicates button to combine all of the entries for a given application into one line and then look at the "Total s" column to see how long it took to back up that application.
Apple really needs to address these two issues, especially the second one as it should be very easy to fix. Simply find out what the iPad is doing between file transmissions and eliminate that problem. If it is prep work, start a new thread on the NEXT file to be backed up while the current one is being transmitted. There are ways to fix this. Please do!

Answer 1

Thank you for this info!
However, you are only communicating with other users, like yourself, here and not anyone from Apple.
If you wish Apple to see and possiblly work toward resolving this issue, you can try sending them feedback here.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html