**Tech explanation why BACKUPS take long, how to make it very short, etc*

Question

I noticed my backups to increase quite a bit over the last few days. I also noticed so many posts on why are backups taking so long, what can I do (only solution given is to click x or modify so that backups are not done, etc). Well to answer all those that want the "real" answer, I decided to do a few minutes of research and share what I've learned. I have seen nothing at all on google or anywhere else about the recommendations I'm suggesting, but from my experience I think it will answer 99% of all the backup threads on this site.
All your backups are being stored in:
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\(Your Name)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\
Vista: C:\Users\*Your User*\Appdata\Local\Apple Computer\
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
The main directories are GUIDs that are based on the version of the iphone, so you may see more than one folder. Make sure to view the date last modified of the folder to make sure you go into the latest one. Order the files inside this directory by date modified. Here you can see how many files are being updated ON EVERY BACKUP. The older ones are not being backed up anymore because you probably uninstalled that app on the iphone (apple doesn't delete old unnecessary backup files that won't be ever used - bad programming #1). They are encoding all these files and inside the files in base 64, so you can decrypt them to view the contents, but you don't really need to and I don't have to show how for the solution to this. Open a file in wordpad. Within the first few lines you'll get an idea of what the backup is.
So here is the solution....sort these files by date modified. My biggest single file was 29,582KB!! looked inside and it's the WeDict app. There are other files from WeDict, but obviously for me if I want fast backups I need to get rid of this app. A few other top files I found are awesome apps on the iphone that have awesome trailers, intro movies for games, etc. Well guess what, they backup every single game intro, trailer, etc. So for instance, the game tap tap tap has a few m4a songs....well every one of those m4a songs are encrypted and backed up EVERY TIME (apple backups up files that don't need to be backed up which would probably reduce backup times by at least 98% - for instance, intro movies don't need to be backed up, nor app songs, nor game instructions, etc because that information should be on itunes backed up separately when you install an app, not when you do backups and it should be smart enough to update that folder when a new version is out....and only do backups on files that can change like high scores in apps, notes, etc - bad programming #2).
So anyway, you can see which apps are taking the most amount of time. Obviously if you remove every app on your iphone, it will backup fast, but some of these apps are shockingly huge. Problem here is that you can have 1 file or 100 files associated with 1 app. You could have only 2 apps installed on your iphone and your backups could be slower than a person having 30 apps just because some apps take a ridiculous amount of more backup data and time and what makes this even worse is every part of the data is encrypted, which I will talk about below (which doesn't need to be). Only time that file is not going to get updated is if it's deleted from your iphone.
You don't HAVE to use base 64 encryption. Come on now, especially on apps? They could lighten the encryption and it would be much faster backups because it has to decode and encode every file now. You are overencrypting these files so huge programs take forever backups. (Bad apple programming #3 don't over encrypt when speed is a necessity on something that doesn't need extreme high security).
As a developer with a computer engineering degree, to also make it even faster than what users were experiencing with backup times prior 2.0. They are obviously not tagging each portion that needs to be backed up individually. Lots of software companies do this to speed stuff up. For instance if you have Kaspersky antivirus with the defaults, the first scan will always take long, but every scan afterwords will be fast because instead of rescanning that file for a virus, it just checks to see if the checksum has changed and if so rescan that file, so most of the time the scan will happen fast unless there has been a period of time that you haven't done one that updates the checksums. They could do something very similar with this. So basically even if you changed a few things on your phone, the backup should be only a few seconds because only those few changes would be signaled to be rebacked up. (bad apple programming for backups #4). This process can make backups be from 98% faster to 99.98% faster....meaning having a backup only take 4 seconds even with 100 apps installed. Actually coding this one thing would make it extremely fast, but would take the most programming time. You can even make an algorithem where for the whole backup process it would just have to read one file that it would check checksums and then tell it to modify 1 or 2 other files and that's it as opposed to backing up (for me almost 5,000 files) some being several MB in size.
So all the above should give apple suggestions on how the can speedup backups by 99.98% faster than how they are doing it now and then anwers all those questions why it takes longer, what needs to change, how can I shorten my backups (this way you can find out what apps are taking the most time), etc.
The problem here is apps will continue to grow, become larger, more trailers, movies, songs embedded inside apps, etc. This problem is only going to grow. The additional problem is that they can say they have tweaked the backup programming to make it faster, just like they did in 2.0.1, but backups seem slower because there are newer better more awesome apps out!! Well that's why it doesn't look like it's faster but it's slower! They will keep doing this as opposed to solving the root of the problem by recoding the whole backup foundation as I'm suggesting from above. Backups will forever take longer and longer and longer and longer. That is what you have to look forward to. My guess is that they are not going to fix the foundation of how backups are done anytime soon having a good idea how they are doing this one. They would have to do a massive overhaul of the whole backup code, which basically they would have to admit that all the time coding this way was a waste and they see no profit from it and we deal with it just by pressing x sometimes. We can complain all we want, but for awhile if you don't want long backups, this is the real solution. What's funny is writing this email took much more time than figuring out what apple is doing, but I think this will help many apple iphone users. Let me know what you guys think.

Answer 1

Supposedly apple made backups slightly faster on 2.0.1, but like I said in my original posting above...it will get worse and worse because of the apps.
Just to verify and you could do this yourself. Right before you plug in to sync and it auto starts the backup process do this...go to the folder where all the files are as mentioned above, sort it by date modified. Add a refresh button on the toolbar. Then start the sync/backup, keep refreshing and you see the files getting updated. There are even temporary files apple's backup process creates that you don't see that keeps adding to a file, so even if you see one file updated, you might see it updated a few times until the whole backup for that file completes.
Here are my stats:
For me this time it took 27 minutes (earlier it took 2 minutes, but like i said with updates to apps, more apps, depending on types of apps, your computer speed, etc it will increase.
For me: In 27 minutes, it updated 1707 files with a total size of 82.8MB. There are a ton of computers that are much faster than mine that I'm sure would cut the minutes down. I have 6 pages of apps, but like I mention above, that doesn't matter because you could have one app that has 400 files with a large size. I would be interested in others posting their results, maybe in this format:
27min 1707files 82.8MB Pentium4HT Antivirus and other large programs running in background.
If you are interested you can even download program that will decrypt these files so you can view them in more detail...for mac, for instance, there is something like this: http://mac.softpedia.com/get/iPhone-Applications/Tools-Utilities/iPhone-Backup-D ecoder.shtml It allows you to backup and modify. It may help you decide what is taking your backups so long and you can decide if it's worth having that app installed versus not having a good backup. You can also pick out you sms backup file, contacts backup file, etc for those really interested in having backups of those specific files.
Hope this helps clear up things for everyone.