Disabling iPhone backups
iPhone applications like FileMagnet and DataCase have made me a happy camper. Those 350Mb of PDFs that I’ve never got round to reading are all now waiting for the delayed trains, delayed meetings, and occasional trips to the toilet that pepper my day. The iPhone’s a surprisingly decent e-book reader; I wouldn’t want to read War and Peace on it, but it’s good enough for 20-30 minute sessions.
It seems however that Apple didn’t consider people might use their iPhones to store large numbers of files. Each time I connected to iTunes the entire contents of my phone was backed up regardless of the fact that no changes have been made since the last sync. A full backup and sync was taking in the order of three to four hours.
Terminal to the rescue:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true