How to Shorten the iPhone Backup

Syncing your iPhone can be a frustrating experience because of the lengthy amount of time iTunes can take creating a backup of your phone. While these backups are important--they preserve your data and contacts in the event your iPhone becomes corrupted and can even be restored to a new iPhone if yours is lost or stolen--they can be time-consuming. Fortunately, there are some handy tricks to shorten the amount of time your iPhone takes to back up.

Instructions

Shortening Your iPhone Backup

1. Connect your iPhone to your personal computer by using your iPod-compatible USB cable.

2. Choose your iPhone in the "Devices" panel on the left side of the iTunes software.

3. Choose the "Photos" tab in the dialogue that opens. Uncheck the "Sync photos from" option and then click the "Remove photos" option. This clears the photo cache, one cause of lengthy backups, from your iPhone.

4. Choose the "Applications" tab and uncheck any applications you're not using. This removes them from the device. Applications are allowed to back up and exchange data during the iPhone backup, and having too many applications lengthens the backup time considerably.

5. Right-click the iPhone icon in the "Devices" panel and select "reset warnings."

6. Click the "sync" button.

7. Click "Don't Send" in the dialogue window that appears asking if you'd like to send diagnostic information to Apple. The exchange of this device performance data is another cause of lengthy backups.

Tips & Warnings

• Transfer any photos you need from your iPhone before removing them.

References

• Gear Diary: Speed Up iPhone Sync
• Apple Support: Extremely Slow Backup