This week's tips will show you how to take control of backups, which are an important part of the sync process each time you connect your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your computer. You'll learn how to speed up your backup performance, how to protect your backups from prying eyes, manage your backups, and how to precent them from occurring.
If you own an iPhone or iPod touch with a built-in camera you probably enjoy the convenience of using the camera for both sill and video photography. We sure do, but Camera Roll can really get bloated. This can lead to longer sync times when you attach your device to iTunes.
If you want to speed things up you should consider the periodic purging of images or videos from your camera roll as often as possible. You can do this after you've synced the photos to iPhoto on your Mac.
Although the iPad doesn't have a camera, you can store screenshots on your camera roll and you can load photos and videos using the camera connection key. Eventually your iPad will suffer the same slow sync and backup times.
The best thing to do is to keep your iOS devices Camera Roll as lean as possible. Sync your images and videos, delete them from the device, and you'll see faster sync times in iTunes.
We highly recommend securing your iOS device backup files that are created in iTunes by using encryption. Unfortunately, encryption isn't on by default.
You can turn it on by launching iTunes, attaching your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using a USB sync cable, waiting for iTunes to recognize your device, and selecting the Summary tab for that device. Under options, locate Encrypt iPhone Backup, and make sure it is checked.
You'll be prompted to select a password for your backup. You'll need it to access your backups later.
iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch backups are all managed by iTunes automatically, but you can manually delete older backups from your current devices or backups from devices you no longer own.
Launch iTunes, open iTunes Preferences, select the Device tab. It looks something like this usually:
You'll be presented with a list of the backups that currently reside on your computer. If you sync more than one device there will be entries for each device in the list. Note that they are listed in chronological order with the most recent backup being the most important one. So probably don't want to delete that one.
If you find a backup that you need to delete locate it in the list and select it. Click the Delete Backup button and iTunes will delete it and remove it from the list.
Backups that display a small padlock are encrypted.
By default iTunes will automatically sync any iPhone, iPad, iPod, or iPod touch when any of these devices is attached to your computer using a USB sync cable. If you'd prefer to manually sync your iOS Device you can. Here's how: launch iTunes, open iTunes Preferences, select the Device tab, and check the box next to Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically.
Once this is done you'll have to manually sync your iOS device after plugging it into your Mac. Keep this in mind since without manually performing a sync periodically you won't have any backups, etc.
This tip is mostly useful if you have more than one Mac. Generally, you usually only sync to one primary computer running iTunes. If you have a secondary computer that you don't sync with then turning this feature on (it is off by default) will prevent any sync activities from happening automatically for any reason on the secondary computer.
Follow this article's author, David W. Martin, on Twitter.
