Tuesday, March 25, 2008

What to do if sync'ing your iPhone takes forever

My iPhone was starting to take a really long time to synchronize. Seemingly forever... More than half an hour, and I only had less than 50 songs, less than 50 contacts, and no big calendar. iTunes spent most of its time "Syncing calendars with iPhone" and "Syncing contacts with iPhone". Well, this seems to be a known bug experienced by many others. The workaround is simple. Open iSync, go into preferences and click the button "Reset Sync History...". When you do this make sure your iPhone is not in the middle of a sync. This should also free some 2G occupied by the file Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/data.syncdb (under your home directory).

As usual: "no warranty, worked for me, hope this helps".

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really want to love my iPhone but there are so many things it needs in order to really be easy to use for business. Right now it takes me much longer to get things done than my previous BlackBerry Curve that broke (okay, it's my fault. I walked into something and cracked the screen).

Since I heard, read and saw video clips of the upcoming iPhone 2.0 I thought.. "Hey, why not. How bad could it be for next few weeks while I wait for the new stuff to come out."

Well, it's bad. The icing on the cake is that the iPhone sync through iTunes on my MacBook takes forever. So long in fact, that it never actually finishes. Everytime I get a phone call it starts over. Now, it may not be so bad except that even when I went 2 hours without a call (don't feel bad for me) it still did not finish.

After finding this blog post I thought my prayers were answered. Following the instructions in this blog reduced the time to sync but I think 1.5 hours is still unacceptable.

I plugged the iPhone into my PC and to my amazement it took 15 minutes and it was done. I do have about 15 years of calendar appointments and over 6,500 contacts so 15 minutes was not bad. Subsequent syncs have only taken a few minutes. Acceptable until 2.0 anyway.

Apple, please help.

I am running out of ink so I will complain about the lack of features when I get a few free minutes.

tsuna said...

Hmm maybe you ought to reboot after reseting the Sync history in iSync. Normally it must be back to normal once you do this.

Also try to close iCal when you don't need it, in my case it's the culprit and keeping it closed helps a lot.

Anonymous said...

On a Mac open Library>Caches (for Hard Drive and for User) and delete the all the caches listed there. Reboot the Mac. Turn off the iPhone (not reset) for a minute or so. Sync. Worked for me

pollyanna said...

Thanks for the workaround—it worked!

Jamie said...

Worked like a charm! Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I had the same issue until I unchecked "sync photos". I was synching one photo and it added an hour to the time.

Gordon Richard said...

Great. Thanks for sharing this information on your Iphone synchronization issues. Well, if it does not fix mine, I can always go to an Iphone repairman.

Ha said...

I have a iphone 5 with IOS 7.0.2 and want to add music. But on connecting to itunes on my PC, it stars sync and then stays as "Syncing contacts". Then I cant do anything and it hangs.

Please help.