October 2011 Archives

Attention nerds.

Here's a guide if interested:

If you aren't a total nerd who has setup a symbolic link for iTunes, you can totally tune out right now.

Problem:

When I was updating my iPhone 4 from iOS 4.3.5 to iOS 5, an extremely large iPhone backup is performed. During the backup I was getting an error:

"An error occurred while backing up this iPhone (-1303). Would you like to continue to update this iPhone?

Continuing will result in the loss of all contents on this iPhone."

Yikes.

Well, I decided to try 6-7 more times over the next hour and I noticed the backup always seemed to fail about 5% of the way in. I tried a number of things including rebooting the phone, turning off antivirus on the PC, and deleting the backup contents to force a new one. This didn't help.

Solution:

If you set up a symbolic link, then get rid of the symbolic link, at least for now.

While the symbolic link has been extremely helpful and hasn't prevented my backups in the past, this time it had to go. I took the symbolic link out (you do this by sending it to the recycle bin) and ran the update again. I immediately noticed the backup was taking a lot longer than the previous attempts. This immediate change in behavior was hopeful. The backup is completed. The upgrade is going now.

I admit this could have just been a coincidence but I'm not above mentioning it. It is possible that, because my symbolic link removal worked, the error was simply related to hard drive reads or writes that were failing. This may mean that some users can get by with just repeated attempts and get lucky. I don't have enough data to draw a conclusion.

Good luck people.

P.S. The update is complete. I have iOS5.