You might have observed that iPhone syncing with firmware 2.0 takes a very long time. The real culprit for this is the iPhone backup process which takes majority of the time.
It appears that the reason for the long time taking backups is because iTunes is taking a complete snapshot of the iPhone applications that you have installed on your iPhone for restoring purpose instead of taking back up of only the applications documents and library data.
So if you have downloaded some of those graphic rich iPhone games from the App Store or have many iPhone applications installed, chances are the backup process crawls.
There have been tips by some folks to simply cancel the backup in iTunes when iPhone backup process is in progress but that might not be the right way to handle this problem as interrupting a backup can result in corrupt backup.
If you are desperate for a solution, then one of the options would be to disable the backup process. However, this is a risky option as it would mean that you will not have a phone backup to restore your iPhone in case you hit an issue which requires restoring the iPhone.
So, if you are willing to take that risk, folks at ZeroLogic have figured out a simple hack to disable this iPhone backup process.
This hack (for Mac users) will change a hidden setting in the iTunes preferences that will force it to skip the backup process. The steps are as follows:
- Quit iTunes.
- Open Terminal.app
- Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
- defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
- Open iTunes
- Plug in your iPhone (running iPhone firmware 2.0 or iPhone 3G) and sync.
Changing the ‘true’ in step 3 to ‘false’ and running it again will re-enable the backup feature.
As always don’t forget to let us know how it goes.
[Gizmodo via ZeroLogic]
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