Kelly, you are still having difficulties eve after following the instructions above from Matt?

Originally Posted by MattIM

Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this problem? I always synch my iPad...which I have done successfully. I have also shutdown my PC, and powered off my iPad. I have wired my laptop to my modem--I have FIOS. Restarted PC, started iTunes, connected iPad, got the prompt to update to new iOS version, clicked update. Backup starts and that is as far as I get. Three attempts so far: first attempt two hours, I abandoned. Went back thru my synch powered down powered up process, started update and went to bed. Get up this am, iPad sleeping, PC in hibernate mode....hmmm Good? Nope. IPad still at 4.3.5. Third attempt now, iPad still on backup. Followed troubleshooting ideas, to no avail. Went to Apple.com, found a troubleshooting guide advising me to do what I have three times now, and still...backup is going nowhere.

I don't think the problem is getting to Apple, my iPad and PC can't seem to get beyond backup. I should disclose that I already successfully updated an iPad2 within one hour. This iPad2 has only 5 purchased apps along with what Apple provides. It is less than a month of ownership. Whereas, the "problem" iPad 64Gig/wifi+3G, is over a year old and has 16gigs of apps, music, videos, books and photos--so I expected a longer time to upgrade. This is the first time my IPad has had a problem with the update process. I am looking forward to getting the new os5 on this veteran iPad -- looking at all the new features on the iPad2 makes me think this new version will make my iPad an even better device.

Is there anyway to skip the backup step in this upgrade?

UPDATE...an hour and a half later, iTunes not going any further than a small green tab on the backup status bar. On the iPad screen, no longer showing "synch in process" and one of my apps reminding me I have a bill to pay! So I am thinking I am NOT going to keep going with backing up and updating. I have commented on the Apple website that shutting down both PC and iPad and starting over again IS NOT a solution.

While I deplore the thought that my iPad is not up-to-date, it does work very well as it is. I'll ignore all of the apps that are updating to take advantage of the new features of os5. I'm up to 16 apps that require an update AFTER I update to the new os5.

Turn off calendar and contacts synching, as well as any other non essential things like bookmarks, notes, etc. the sync will be considerably faster and you can then use the cloud to update all calendars, etc... I use Outlook in Win 7 professional and couldn't wait hours for a sync. It worked for me.

Yeah. I followed Matt's directions and just knew it would be updated when I got up in the morning. Not! I have no patience for this kind of stuff. Think I'll take my friend's advice and make an appt at the Apple store. Or maybe I'll just get a new phone. Lol

I understand Kelly. My iPad kept getting stuck in backup mode. After several days I gave in and restored it to factory settings. I didn't have much info to lose, so I was cool with that. None of my friends have upgraded yet because they are afraid they will have problems too.

Thanks MattIM, your steps in post #27 saved the day for me. I believe it was deleting the past backups that allowed the backup to continue without getting stuck/frozen.

Note: I would also suggest that people back up the iPad backup before they delete any old instances. On Windows Vista or Win7 go to c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup. There you will see a directory with a long strong of numbers and characters which creates a unique directory name. Those are the directories to copy. When you follow Matt's instructions and delete the past backups for every backup you delete one of these directories will disappear.

I also went in to the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows and made sure that the free drive space was greater than the size of my iPad storage (to ensure I wasn't running out of room).

I took a backup of the above directory on Windows Vista on a laptop to a Win7 Desktop. I didn't think to close the windows on the desktop so it was actually still attached to the iPad backup directory on the Vista machine. When I started the iOS 5 install on the laptop I could see the backup being created on my Win7 machine that was still pointing to the backup machine. What is really odd is that about 50 to 75% through the iPad backup the backup directory just disappeared. Instead of being in the unique directory name my open window that was watching the backup was bumped up to the Backup directory. Sure enough at the end of the Backup, iTunes went through a few more steps that MattIM listed in post 27. Then when it came to restoring I had an Error 5000. This was because there was no Backup to restore from. I closed the iOS5 insteall window and iTunes then prompted me to setup a new iPad or to restore from my iPod backup which was the only Backup I hadn't deleted. The Backup from the iOS5 install was gone, it didn't exist in the recycle bin either, I'm not sure why it was deleted but it was gone.

I then went back to the backup of the Backup that was on my Win7 machine (the one I created before deleting the iPad backups from iTunes. I had crazy unique directory, along with version of the same number with a 1, 2, 3, etc., appended to the end for every time I tried the install. I went back to the original backup with no appended version number on the end. I moved it back to the iPad Backup directory as listed at the top of this posted. I had to undock and redock the iPad (until I did this iTunes wouldn't show me the copy I had copied back from my desktop). Once I redocked things just worked. THe restore just reinstalled itself. The iPad might be about a month out of dates in regards to updates but it is now running iO5 and it is only missing a couple minor things as far as I can see at the moment.

The very first time I started the upgrade to iOS 5 it made it through a bunch of the process and then threw some corrupt backup file errors so that was likely at the root of my problems and why I had to remove the older backups before it would get through the Backup stage of setup.

My iPhone 4 takes about 12 hours, sometimes more, to sync if I don't intervene. If I stop it, nothing is lost so don't worry about that. I stop the wireless sync and use the cable with WiFi off and it is done in four to five minutes. My iPad syncing wirelessly happens in normal time as well. Its frustrating. I thought this was supposed to be some fantastic convenience. But no.