Attention nerds.
This post is about how I solved my problem upgrading to iOS 5 on on my apple device. If you aren’t a total nerd who has setup a symbolic link for iTunes, you can totally tune out right now.
I have an Solid State Drive (SSD) in my Windows 7 64-bit PC which–while extremely fast–has some space limitations. This might cause one to setup a symbolic link to send iTunes backups onto a different drive, as I have.
Here’s a guide if interested: http://lifehacker.com/5722932/free-up-hard-drive-space-by-changing-the-location-of-itunes-backups
Problem:
When I was updating my iPhone 4 (from iOS 4.3.5 to iOS 5), an extremely large iPhone backup was 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.
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 unsuccessful steps including rebooting the phone, turning off antivirus on the PC, and deleting the previous iPhone backups to force a new one to be created. These steps did not help.
Solution:
If you had at some point taken the time to cleverly setup 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 appeared to be the problem. 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 previous attempts. This immediate change in behavior was hopeful, and the backup was completed successfully after a while.
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.