slow to cancel iPhone backup

[edjusted]

Sometimes, when I need to reboot, I can't because Big Sur is backing up my iPhone. If I go into finder and cancel the backup, it takes a very long time to stop (minutes if not longer).

But today I noticed that if I disconnect my iPhone from my Mac, it stops immediately.

Is there something I can do to make canceling the backup faster? Or is it just sloppy programming on Apple's part? If it can stop on a dime when I disconnect my phone, it seems like it should be able to stop quickly when I do it in Finder.

 

[bernuli]

Sometimes, when I need to reboot, I can't because Big Sur is backing up my iPhone. If I go into finder and cancel the backup, it takes a very long time to stop (minutes if not longer).

But today I noticed that if I disconnect my iPhone from my Mac, it stops immediately.

Is there something I can do to make canceling the backup faster? Or is it just sloppy programming on Apple's part? If it can stop on a dime when I disconnect my phone, it seems like it should be able to stop quickly when I do it in Finder.

I had a similar problem on Catalina. The issue ended up being one of the apps on my iPhone was creating 200,000 empty temporary files that ended up being backed up. That increased the backup time from under a minute to sometimes 10-15 minutes. I was never able to cancel a backup mid stream, but I did fix the problem iPhone app and now iPhone backups zip along. Still can't cancel but they are so quick I really don't need to.

 

[edjusted]

I had a similar problem on Catalina. The issue ended up being one of the apps on my iPhone was creating 200,000 empty temporary files that ended up being backed up. That increased the backup time from under a minute to sometimes 10-15 minutes. I was never able to cancel a backup mid stream, but I did fix the problem iPhone app and now iPhone backups zip along. Still can't cancel but they are so quick I really don't need to.

How did you determine what the problem app was?

 

[bernuli]

How did you determine what the problem app was?

It took a while. I started out trying to figure out why Time Machine backups of my Mac were seeming to hang. They were completing fine but over 20 minutes with not many files changed. Then I noticed my iPhone backup directory had well over 200,000 files in it. I used perl to analyze the backup sets and iPhone Manifest.db.

If you want to see a list of files in your current backup set, you can run these 3 commands which will give you a csv file on your desktop named manifestCSV.csv. Note that if there is already a file on your desktop named manifestCSV.csv it will be overwritten.

cp -pir ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/[YOUR_UUID_HERE]/Manifest.db ~/Desktop
sqlite3 -csv -header ~/Desktop/Manifest.db "select * from Files" > manifestCSV.csv
open ~/Desktop/manifestCSV.csv

I'd have to go dig up the perl I used to analyze the backup sets.

 

[edjusted]

It took a while. I started out trying to figure out why Time Machine backups of my Mac were seeming to hang. They were completing fine but over 20 minutes with not many files changed. Then I noticed my iPhone backup directory had well over 200,000 files in it. I used perl to analyze the backup sets and iPhone Manifest.db.

If you want to see a list of files in your current backup set, you can run these 3 commands which will give you a csv file on your desktop named manifestCSV.csv. Note that if there is already a file on your desktop named manifestCSV.csv it will be overwritten.

cp -pir ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/[YOUR_UUID_HERE]/Manifest.db ~/Desktop
sqlite3 -csv -header ~/Desktop/Manifest.db "select * from Files" > manifestCSV.csv
open ~/Desktop/manifestCSV.csv

I'd have to go dig up the perl I used to analyze the backup sets.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.