iPhone annoyances…

Lately I’d been having a lot of trouble with my iPhone 3G and it appears I’m not alone!

The problem is that the backup portion of the sync process takes hours. Essentially for me this means forever because I need my phone and someone would generally call during the process aborting the whole thing. I could, of course, have put the phone in airplane mode, but being out of touch for hours isn’t generally an option for me.
I tried a bunch of different “fixes” for the problem I found on the web, but nothing really worked. Ultimately I had to do a number of things, mostly reinstalling the software after dumping my apps. It seems too many apps are a problem (more than 10?) and it’s possible that some of the apps themselves may be causing the problem.
I ended up having to pretty much start over with the whole mess to clean up the mess I was. I’m not happy because it caused me to lose my notes, settings, and other stuff, but what are ya gonna do?
Here’s what I did. This may be overkill, but it did work.
1. Set backups off:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
2. Turned off syncing of apps in iTunes
3. Deleted all iPhone apps from my iMac so they couldn’t accidentally show up again
4. Deleted all backups of the iPhone from iTunes preferences (they all claimed to be corrupt anyway)
4. Turned off syncing altogether
5. Reinstalled iPhone software 2.01
6. Turned back on syncing and loaded my tunes and such, but no apps
7. Set up my email and such on the iPhone
At this point I had a fresh iPhone with no apps. I then synced a couple of times to make sure it worked. Then I turned on the backup function again:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false
I then backed up my “clean” iPhone. This didn’t take more than a minute or two so I knew I was on the right track.
Finally I used iTunes to load just the few apps that I was really using. Yes the Light Sabre stuff is fun, but I only used once to show off – I didn’t need it or a number of other things. I did keep:
Tap Tap Revenge
eReader
Wordpress
iGoogle
Remote
Once those were loaded I did another backup and was pleased to see it only took about a minute.
So I’m back to “normal.” I did lose a few things like my notes (which I can recreate, but what a pain) however I can function normally without having to wait hours for the phone to do its backups.
I’m really not happy about any of this and am hoping that Apple can sort all of this out pronto!
Aloha!
At this point I basically had a fresh iPhone