Ugh, Backups!

[Night Spring]

So I bought MobileFinder yesterday, and used it to copy my work-related files onto my Touch -- about 500MB. It took most of the afternoon to copy them over, but it's worth it for me to have all my work-related files at my fingertips. And then I downloaded a few more apps, made a few changes to my playlists, and started syncing them to the Touch, and I notice that the backup is taking forever...

And then it hit me that the backup is probably copying all the files I just copied from my computer to the Touch back onto my computer!!!!

There really needs to be a better way to handle the backup process. I don't want to cancel the backup, because I do want the data from my other apps to get backed up. I just need to be able to selectively exclude some apps/files from being backed up! *sigh*

 

[Tragedies]

Yeah, my backups also take ages.

Apple should fix this.

 

[plumbingandtech]

I feel your pain.

Agreed, apple needs to fix this ASAP.

 

[MBHockey]

Does anybody know where these backups are stored on our computers?

Edit: It's in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

 

[mizelly41]

If you don't mind not having a backup, just hit the x button in the display window in Itunes next to where it says backing up Ipod or Iphone. That is what I do and then my Iphone continues syncing after that.

 

[elbirth]

I posted a thread asking this yesterday but never got any responses, so I'll try here since backups are being discussed... thanks to MBHockey for pointing out where the backups are saved. Now that I see them, I see that they really don't make much sense to a human.

Does anyone know if it's at all possible to extract any specific data from these backups? I was trying to get hold of some lost photos from my camera roll that I failed to transfer to my computer before doing a restore....

 

[Night Spring]

Does anyone know if it's at all possible to extract any specific data from these backups? I was trying to get hold of some lost photos from my camera roll that I failed to transfer to my computer before doing a restore....

If you open up the backup files with a text editor, there are notations at the top that you can often decipher to figure out what app the file belongs to and what type of file it is. For instance, I found some files that said "mp3," and when I copied them elsewhere and changed their extension to mp3, I was able to play them like any other mp3 files. However, since there are thousands of files in the backup, the chances of finding any particular file you are looking for is...

I suspect that the "Manifest.plist" file contains the master list of all the backup files. Perhaps there is a Mac program that can read that file and extract useful into from it?

P.S. The backup files have the extension "mdbackup," so you should be able to find them by searching your main hard drive for files with that extension.

 

[elbirth]

If you open up the backup files with a text editor, there are notations at the top that you can often decipher to figure out what app the file belongs to and what type of file it is. For instance, I found some files that said "mp3," and when I copied them elsewhere and changed their extension to mp3, I was able to play them like any other mp3 files. However, since there are thousands of files in the backup, the chances of finding any particular file you are looking for is...

I suspect that the "Manifest.plist" file contains the master list of all the backup files. Perhaps there is a Mac program that can read that file and extract useful into from it?

P.S. The backup files have the extension "mdbackup," so you should be able to find them by searching your main hard drive for files with that extension.

Thanks, I'll definitely give that a go and see if I happen to have any sort of success. I'd just restore it, but iTunes says it's corrupt or incompatible with my iPhone (it's the same phone I made the backup with) so i'm not even really sure if anything can be gotten. If the backups didn't take 2 hours at a time, this would be less of an issue

 

[MBHockey]

It's interesting to me that Time Machine automatically ignores this folder when backing up your entire user folder. Why would they do that?