iTunes’ full image backup of your iPhone can take much more than you’re willing to wait, if you made changes to the installed applications. I’m not talking about a minute or two, but tens of minutes, and it’s time we don’t have these days, so the solution is to disable the iPhone’s backup process, and skip it, isn’t it?

But there are two things (risks) you should consider before doing what ZeroLogic found out.

1. Don’t interrupt your ongoing backup process to skip it. Not that something will block or you losing warranty on your iPhone. It’s just that you may forget to do it correctly again and restoring would be useless because you’ll have only corrupted files.
2. Using this “solution” means that you won’t have a phone backup, so act with caution.

So here is what you have to do to disable the iTunes iPhone backup process:

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.

Let me know how it goes by leaving a comment here. I will not be held responsible if your phone takes a crap and you have no backup.

Enjoy!

Image courtesy of ArsTechnica

Filed under Apple, iPhone, iTunes
Tags: iPhone backup, iPhone restore, iTunes iPhone backup