Disable Backing up of your iPhone

We all know how annoyingly long the backup process is of the iPhone. If you have had to restore a backup then you also know that half the time they don’t work and it is best that you just take a deep breath and restore to factory defaults. Well here are some instructions for Mac users on how to disable backing up of your iPhone. (Disclaimer: This is simply a howto and not a suggestion or recommendation that anybody do this. I say this so that you can’t hold me responsible for data loss that you incur).

This command will change a hidden setting in the iTunes preferences that will force it to skip the backup process.

1. - Quit iTunes.
2. - Open Terminal.app
3. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

4. - Open iTunes
5. - Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don’t have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the ‘true’ in step 3 to ‘false’ will re-enable the backup feature.

Please feel free to share your thoughts/comments below.

Backing up the iPhone…

If you have docked your phone more then then once in the last 2 days since updating to 2.0 you are probably sick and tired of how long it takes to back up your iPhone. I just docked my phone after installing four apps using the App Store on the iPhone. It took 8 minutes to back up, then it still had to copy the apps I downloaded. This is crazy. I think I will be doing a review on the backup process soon.