My wife has an iPhone SE, running 10.2. For some reason, the iCloud backup is not working for her. She has the 50 GB account, and is trying to backup approximately 9 GB of data. It will get about 1/3 of the way through the backup, saying it has about 15 minutes remaining, then the time remaining jumps up to 3 hours and it never completes the backup, no matter how long we leave it plugged in and locked. I tried turning off the photos app last night to reduce the size of the backup to approximately 2.5 GB and it still did the same thing. Any thoughts on what we need to do differently to get iCloud backups to start working for this phone? I was trying to back it up before I install iOS 10.3 on it.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Problems with iCloud backup
- Thread starter wa2be
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yep, that didn't help. I did a google search last night and discovered this is a fairly common problem. Sounds like an old backup she did almost a year ago (the last time it successfully backed up) may be corrupt. I read that if you delete the old backup and start over it will usually fix the problem. If that doesn't work, it probably means that one of the apps that is part of the backup is causing the problem (corrupted data somehow). I tried deleting the old backup and starting a new backup. That didn't fix the problem, so now I'm gonna have to turn off all of the apps that are currently backing up, then turn each one on and do a backup individually for each app until I run into the one that is causing the problem. Hopefully this takes care of it because it's a major pain having to fix stuff like this.
Hi - did you get anywhere with resolving this please? I have found I am experiencing exactly the same issue.
No. I tried deleting the old backup and starting a new backup. That did not work. I tried turning off all of the apps that were backing up and just backing up one single, small app. That did not work either. At this point I have no idea what to do. The phone will get about 1/3 of the way through the backup and then it just stops, and it tells me there's 3 or 4 hours remaining. I will try backing it up to iTunes instead, hopefully that works.
Thats exactly my experience as well. An iTunes backup does work every time but its a manual thing that I have to get around to doing every day. The automatic daily iCloud backup when it used to work was a very useful thing to have.
Back it up to iTunes and just let iCloud backup handle itself. It will try when you plug it in and will likely eventually succeed.
Sometimes Apple's servers are wonky and iCloud doesn't work quite right temporarily. I've learned to not rely on iCloud for anything mission critical, just for convenience only.
Sometimes Apple's servers are wonky and iCloud doesn't work quite right temporarily. I've learned to not rely on iCloud for anything mission critical, just for convenience only.
It's more than a temporary problem. Her phone has not successfully backed up to iCloud since last May. We've purposely left it plugged in over-night to see if it could get past the "3 hours remaining" to finish the backup. No luck on that. There's something not working properly, but I'm out of ideas to track it down. I may take it to the Apple Store to see if they have any ideas. Otherwise I need to cancel having the 50 GB of storage for that phone because we are paying for nothing (even though it's only $.99 per month).
I wonder if it could be a problem with your local network?
Have you tried backing up her phone on a different Wi-Fi?
My iPhone 7 and iPad Air 2 both backup daily on this same network. But it might be worth trying hers on a different one just to see what happens.