OS4 Backup taking forever?

Trying to do the upgrade on my 3G iPhone.
Started last night and cancelled after about 2:45 of "backing up".
Trying again tonight (2 hours so far).
Just like last night, the status bar has barely moved and looks like about 5% done.
Is this normal? Is anyone else taking this ling for backup?
I sync weekly and that takes about an hour including the backup so I have no idea why this is taking so long.

I finally upgraded to OS4 yesterday. I let the backup run for 5+ hours before I aborted the process. I knew the backup was running, but I wasn't going to wait until it backs up 3gb worth of data (it took 5 hours to do 550MB). I ended up backing up my own data (transfer all my pics to my MacBook, manually copied down my contacts list and then sync with another computer (essentially wiping out my iPhone data, including all my mp3 which I have a backup copy). I did not sync my apps since I have a bunch of apps that I did not want to reinstall. I only used few hundred MBs on my 8 gig iPhone after wiping most of my data out. I then plug my phone back to my laptop, do the backup then (which thankfully was super fast, for the first time ever), and it backed up my contacts and apps that I haven't synced with the other computer. I downloaded and installed IOS4 (less than 10 minutes) which required a backup (less than 10 minutes). Once I got the IOS4 running, I synced it with my apps and contacts in iTunes and presto. I got my contacts list and apps back on my phone. Backing up is a lot faster since. Good luck!
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(Restoring) backup taking forever

Hi,
I've a big problem with my iPhone 4 and iTunes. I've read discussion on a similar problem, without finding an answer that could work with me.
Today I tried to sync my iPhone 4 (iOS 5) via iTunes/cable. The backup phase was lasting forever. I tried to stop it after a couple hours, but iTunes refuses to stop. I quitted it, but it refuses to quit. I forced quit it. As a consequence, the communication icon on the iPhone disappeared.
I tried the above more times, until the point when the iPhone was no longer recognized by iTunes, and refuses to show any other than the iTunes icon, together with an USB cable.
Trying to restore data was unsuccesfull for several tries. iTunes told me that it was impossibile to restore. A link to the Apple site for more information resulted in an empty page.
After a while I tried again. This time, restoring the iPhone and keeping it to the original state worked. At this point, restoring my latest backup began. It is still going on, and on, and one hour a half has passed, with iTunes saying it is calculating the remaining time, and the iPhone saying restore is going on.
Do you have any idea? The technician at the Apple support had no idea of what was happening. I've no idea as well, and am waiting with my phone doing nothing, and no message or change conforting me things have not frozen.
Thank you,
Paolo

It didn't work: the restore time was growing (it reached 18 hours!), and was not moving.
So, I decided to reboot everything, and start fresh, with no backup. This time it worked, but I had to spend the afternoon reinstalling everything.
I'm not too happy of what happened, in particular because there is no explicaton for it.
Paolo

Time Machine backup taking forever after 10.6.2

After installing 10.6.2, Time Machine is taking ages to back up 3.2GB to my USB external drive. It is taking so long, in fact, that it has not done a single backup since I installed the latest update on November 9 — my computer did not stay up and on long enough for it to complete one back up. Today, it has been running non-stop for some ten hours and has so far done 104 MB of the 3.2GB. This is crazy. It did happen in the past that backups took a long time after a major update, but never this long.
Everything worked fine before the 10.6.2 update. Is anyone else having similar problems?

Ok, so here’s what happened since the last post.
I did what you recommended: had the external hard drive “repaired” (the disk utility said it was ok), and started the backup again, and again it was excruciatingly slow (it had backed up 40MB after five hours or so).
At that point I decided to erase the backup volume and start anew (after formatting etc). But again it got stuck after backing up 3.5GB out of 180GB. The Time Machine widget said “Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed” and “Waiting for index to be ready”. I again stopped the backup and did what your guide recommended. I excluded the backup volume from Spotlight and restarted the process. This time it worked. The backup was complete in reasonable time and has been working fine since.
The only problem is Spotlight. After the backup, I removed the Time Machine volume from the “do not index list”, but Spotlight does not seem to have responded. It either has not indexed the backup volume or is not admitting it: searching for anything inside Time Machine always returns “no results”.
Thanx a lot for your help. If you can give me a hint on how to get Spotlight working again, I’d be really, really grateful.

Why is my first icloud backup taking FOREVER?!?!

Why is my first icloud back up taking 49 hours? It is plugged in, on wifi and lock screen is on. I have pretty much unchecked every app but my contacts, photos, calendar etc.
What gives?

How time machine works is that it makes an initial back up and from there it scans your system for changes. When it finds a change it adds the changes on top of your current backup. So if you have a folder full of pictures then rename them or change them, etc it'll resave/archive the pictures ontop of what it already backed up. It doesn't keep a single "state" of backup. This allows you to "look back in time" and see if you can find something you might have accidentally changed or deleted or etc. Once the disk becomes full it will delete the oldest backups to keep archiving newer files.
I would suggest that you partition your external drive to a size that allows you to keep free the desired extra storage space you're looking to use. For example partition the drive to two 500GB partitions one for storage one for time machine.

First Time Machine Backup Taking Forever

I'm backing up my Mac for the first time using a WD My Passport Ultra. When I initially tried to back it up, it had finished like 1GB in like 2 hours, so I restarted my computer to try it again. Once I started the backup again, it started off much faster, about 2.5GB in 15 minutes, and it gave me an estimate of 11 hours to complete, so I left it overnight to finish, but after 12 hours, I woke up again to find that only 12GB in total had been backed up. Why am I having this problem?
I have also tried backing up using the WD Anywhere Backup software, that runs really well to about 60% or so, before it freezes on one file. Is my backup deffective? I had a similar problem backing up my Mac with another WD backup and this is actually my free replacement, so I'm not sure if like WD is maybe not working with my Mac?

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Backups Taking Forever

I recently moved my iTunes folder from an old XP laptop to a new Vista one. I set-up iTunes on the new computer loaded everything from the old folder into the newly installed iTunes and everything seems to be working well.
However, now when I do a back-up, it hangs at about the 75% mark and doesn't progress any further. On my old computer, the back-up took about 10-15 minutes. Now, it will hang for hours.
Is there something I should change, remove, or do differently? I have the same apps, photos, and music as I did before (with the exception that about 15 apps needed updates after I loaded everything on to the new computer).
Can someone suggest something? I'm afraid if I never get a complete back-up, and if something happens to my iPhone, I going to have trouble getting a complete restore (if needed).

Well, mboxmail is an app to make hotmail act like an IMAP account. It works quite well in that regard, but the first releases handled data badly & caused long backups like you're experiencing. Users complained to the developer & they fixed the issue in subsequent updates. Apps like that, that have alot of data that's constantly changing is where I'd start to look. Like I said, it's kind of hit or miss. One way to do this is, let's say you have 15 apps. Delete five from your phone. Try & backup. If the backup sails through, then you know the problem rests with one of those five. It it doesn't, then you know the problem is with one of the remaining ten.
And when you do identify the app, COMPLAIN TO THE DEVELOPER!

TS4009 My iCloud is taking forever to backup,why?

Why is my first iCloud backup taking forever?

An iCloud Backup (at least the first one or ones after any major changes) can take a long time.
It is entirely dependent on the amount of data being backed up, plus the speed of your internet connection. If you have many gigabytes to backup and a slow upspeed it will take a long time.
Buying iCloud Storage space will not increase the capacity of your phone.

First backup is taking forever (more than two days) in my MacBook Air

First backup is taking forever , painfully slow, I am using MacBook Air, what can I do to speed things up. is there a particular way to set TC up ?? I set it up to join an existing wireless network, is this right or wrong? I just need a few tips to make the backup faster.

Answer: yes, the Time Capsule is junk - in my opinion. I was excited about an all-in-one router plus 1TB of backup wirelessly available, but if you check the many posts about this thing, you'll hear about numerous problems:
- unbelievably slow backups, overnight or longer for the first, very long for even small backups after minor activity - and not necessarily due to network speeds.
- heat issues - this thing runs very hot, even with fans running, and people have had to put little rubber feet under it to improve airflow, etc. - not something I think is reasonable for a $500+ item - some get an "overheating" message from the utility app.
- problems with hanging - it hangs on "Preparing Backup" (as it did for me for days) and doesn't backup - thereby making the unit useless as it was designed.
- mounting and recognition issues - not so much with me but for quite a few others.
SEND IT BACK... I am sending mine back and going back to manual backups where I can see exactly what is being backed up to my external HDD and where it is. The opaque nature of the entire Time Machine backup is irritating to me - TC was "backing up" say, "75MB of 125.3MB" but I had no idea what it was backing up, and why only 125.3MB? Was that all my activity changed during the session? Or all sorts of system files, etc. being backed up? I'm not techie enough to get into the guts of it, so I am going back to my usual external HDD to do it by hand. It's a good habit to get into (if inconvenient compared to the TC) but at least I am secure with it.
I am also not sure if TC can be used as a plug-and-play USB storage drive if I were to, say, just connect it to a Windows machine and try to access files in folders. I suppose not?

I am running my first time machine backup onto a Western Digital MyBook Live. It is taking forever. Is there antivirus software running in the background or any other settings I need to change to speed it up? Also I am on a wireless network.

I am running my first time machine backup onto a Western Digital MyBook Live. It is taking forever. Is there antivirus software running in the background or any other settings I need to change to speed it up? Also I am on a wireless network.

The initial Time Machine backup can certainly take a long time over wireless. Days, possibly. It's impossible for anyone here to be able to predict how long it will take, and wireless environmental conditions can change at any time.
Is there antivirus software running in the background
Only you can determine that. If you're using third party AV software, anything is possible.
NAS devices may not be compatible with Time Machine, regardless of what their manufacturers may claim. Even after the Time Machine backup completes, your backup may be unreliable. You may not discover that until you need to rely upon the backup for some reason, and corruption can occur months or years from now.
Time Machine supports the following backup configurations:
A locally mounted volume
Time Capsule
A volume resident on a USB hard disk connected directly to a Time Capsule or current production AirPort Extreme Base Station.
That's it. Any configuration other than the above list places you in an experimental category. If your backup fails, you're on your own.

Okay so I just got a new MacBook and I'm setting it up. I decided to not download all of my files to iCloud drive and its taking forever to load to the next page. Is this normal for it to take so long? After all I didn't even download my stuff?

why is it taking forever to load!?

The files you are loading into the new computer are by wi-fi? If you have no other option
that may be OK but slow. A faster method would be Ethernet cable from internet router
or modem, instead of wireless. Most of the setup process can take some time.
What are these files? Where are they now?
Do you have a backup on-site, & not online?
Did you check to see if the operating system was updated as part of the setup before use?
The Software Update can locate later parts to the as-shipped system, that may be needed.
Other upgrades or new apps are through the Mac App Store, some through App Store, etc.
As part of the setup, you could use a migration assistant if you have a backup from the old
computer or have other files saved in an external hard drive to import.
Hopefully your process won't be drawn out too long...
Good luck & happy computing!

For the first time i want to sync music from the itunes on my desktop to my iPod touch 5th gen. it kept taking forever to back up! is backing up needed? all i wanna do is sync the music

for the first time i want to sync music from the itunes on my desktop to my iPod touch 5th gen. it kept taking forever to back up! is backing up needed? all i wanna do is sync the music and the back up is taking way too long....
i have not yet until now tried to sync music to this ipod touch it always syncs music on to my ipod classic..please please help me! im dying to have music on this ipod touch...

It depends how much you have to backup..
You could also have a problem.
Is any progress showing?
How long as it been backing up?
Any other text in the status bar in addition to saying backing up?

My e mail is taking forever to download.

My e mail is taking forever to download. It comes through fine on my i phone via the same wireless router. It is showing the amount of e mails being downloaded, I know there are no large files in there. Its as if something is blocking or slowing down the download. The rest of the computer works fine, as does outgoing mail. Any clues anyone?

Has the unit EVER been jailbroke? Has it EVER been dropped? Did it EVER get excessively wet? Did you EVER load a pirated developer's version of the IOS?
If "No" to all the above, first try a system reset. It cures many ills and it's quick, easy and harmless...
Hold down the on/off switch and the Home button simultaneously until you see the Apple logo. Ignore the "Slide to power off" text if it appears. You will not lose any apps, data, music, movies, settings, etc.
If the Reset doesn't work, try a Restore. Note that it's nowhere near as quick as a Reset. It could take well over an hour! Connect via cable to the computer that you use for sync. From iTunes, select the iPad/iPod and then select the Summary tab. Follow the on-screen directions for Restore and be sure to say "yes" to the backup. You will be warned that all data (apps, music, movies, etc.) will be erased but, as the Restore finishes, you will be asked if you wish the contents of the backup to be copied to the iPad/iPod. Again, say "yes."
At the end of the basic Restore, you will be asked if you wish to sync the iPad/iPod. As before, say "yes." Note that that sync selection will disappear and the Restore will end if you do not respond within a reasonable time. If that happens, only the apps that are part of the IOS will appear on your device. Corrective action is simple - choose manual "Sync" from the bottom right of iTunes.
If you're unable to do the Restore and you have IOS-6 or lower, go into Recovery Mode per the instructions here. Also, if you have IOS-7, read this.

Time machine to airdisk taking forever...maybe a gig an hour

So I set up my Airport Extreme Airdisk as a Time Machine disk. I started the first backup and its taking forever...if I am lucky its sending a gig an hour on an 802.11n machine.
Any thoughts?

It seems that Time Machine uses Apple's disk imaging mechanism.
The version of this in Leopard uses a helper app called diskimages-helper. You can see it in the process list of Activity Monitor when running Time Machine, Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner disk imaging.
This app seems to have issues with images larger than around 80GB. I have now shown that whether started by Time Machine, Disk Utility or Carbon Cloner images between 120 and 200GB run flat chat (disk limited) for the first 80GB or so and then slow down dramatically.
How much data are you trying to backup?
On the upside, once the first copy is made. incremental Time Machine backups seem to be very fast. Perhaps if you set time Time Machine with enough exclusions to get the first image down to 80GB, it may be possible to add the rest later. I have not tried this.
On the topic of should you use an airdisk: I see that it is a requirement that the backup disk/share supports ACLs. I think Airdisk might be OK for data files, but probably will not restore a full working boot disk. Have you tried that?
Bill Northcott

IPad and iTunes taking forever to sync out of the blue

My iPad synced in 'normal' time, just under 10 minutes, yesterday. Today, the syncing is taking forever! Appears that a completely new backup was done, and now it barely moves. I did not download anything to iPad between these syncs. I used it, charged it, and shut it down and restarted it. Any suggestions?

HI...
In the iTunes window with the Summary tab selected, check the bottom of that window to make sure there's enough free space available.
If there's enough space, check out the information here for managing content manually.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1535
Carolyn

Sync suddenly taking forever.

Not sure if my installing iphone developer software did this, but since I did, it is taking forever for my iphone to sync.
It is stuck on step 1 of 5 (Backing up).
Any thoughts?
Been trying to sync this iphone for almost 2 hours.

Ignoring the SDK stuff.
1. for now you can always click the X on the status bar of iTunes saying backing up and it will skip that step and move on.
2. There is a reported issue that has been repeated in here for older iOS's about the Camera roll and backing up taking a long time. Many have found when you save an image to the camera roll from the web or an email that sometimes (nobody isolated if it is size or file type etc) will cause the backup to hang. If you have any photos in your camera roll that were not taken with the camera (eg: you saved to it some other way) email them off to yourself then delete them from the camera roll and try again.
I believe this issue was fixed with the 4.0 updates.

OS4 Backup taking forever?

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