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I'd been having a few issues with my iPhone 4 (one of the main being that apps wouldn't open and turning it off and on again to remedy this resulted in me losing all of my contacts in my address book). When attempting to restore my iPhone, it sometimes causes my computer screen to become distorted and freeze my computer.

I'd been on iOS 5.1 (?) for a while (having put of updating it due to lack of space) and my brother suggested updating to the most recent iOS. I did this, but afterwards, my phone said it had to reset back to factory settings. I reset it, but when I went to restore my backup, I got the message “iTunes could not restore the iPod 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer.” Having looked around, people seemed to suggest that I needed to clear some disk space on my laptop. I've done this, and I have 217 GB free, so I can't see why this should be an issue now, but I'm still having the same problem.

Can anyone suggest a solution?

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  • Have you tried these tips from an Apple Support article? – sameetandpotatoes Aug 18 '13 at 14:22
  • Well, when I first tried backing up my backup, I got an error (I can't remember what it was exactly), so I was too wary to do anything. – lokodiz Aug 18 '13 at 14:34
  • Let's separate the two questions. One is how to troubleshoot a problematic computer/iPhone interaction. The second is getting photos back. Since we have a lot of questions that cover getting photos back, I'll edit that part out and you can ask a new question if you don't find a good answer here for that. – bmike♦ Aug 18 '13 at 14:41
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The simplest thing to do is to take your iPhone to a new computer and see if you can determine if the problem is the iPhone / OS on that device or the problem lies with your computer.

Also - you might check iTunes to be sure you have the old backup stored safely (perhaps backing up the computer itself)

iTunes places the backup files in the following places:

  • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
  • Windows XP: \Documents and Settings(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\
  • Windows Vista and Windows 7: \Users(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

Once you know which of the two parties is not working correctly, you should be able to take your troubleshooting to the next step and consult the site here or Apple's support articles for how to proceed:

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  • When making a backup, my computer has issues copying two files from the backup to another folder. Will this prove to be an issue? – lokodiz Aug 18 '13 at 16:23
  • It will be an issue if one of those folders has the iPhone backup. You might check to see when the last time you backed that device up to iCloud or check in photo stream to see if you have the content you care about somewhere else besides that computer. It won't matter if the issues are other folders not relating to iTunes and backup. – bmike♦ Aug 18 '13 at 16:47
  • Ok, just to check something: when does iTunes actually make backups? Am I able to stop it from making a new backup? – lokodiz Aug 18 '13 at 18:23
  • It will back up each sync session. You might want to rename the device before the next sync, but since it can detect the device's serial number often it will still overwrite the last backup even if you change names. You want to zip the folder (or otherwise make a copy of it if you don't want iTunes to overwrite a past backup with a new one). – bmike♦ Aug 18 '13 at 20:00

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