My Super Collection of iPhone Sync Errors
Is it just me, or does iTunes come up with a different excuse for not syncing with the iPhone each and every day?
Don’t get me wrong – syncing is pretty reliable on the whole, and whenever an error does occur, a resync or reconnect usually sorts it out.
Still, I’m amazed at the sheer number of things that can apparently go wrong during syncing. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? I must get an error dialog of some sort at least once a week.
So I started collecting them (sad I know). Here’s the collection I’ve built up so far, over the last few months…
The iPhone sync error hall of fame
First up, we have the good old Microsoft-style “‘unknown error occured’ followed by unhelpful number” dialog:
…and its close “iPhone with no name” cousin:
Hurrah – a slight improvement! It got the iPhone name right on this day, and gave me a whole new exciting random number to ponder over:
Damn! It’s forgotten the name of the iPhone again. That’ll teach my iPhone to respond invalidly:
If in doubt, just call it an “iPhone”:
Oh dear, we do seem to be having problems today don’t we, iTunes? Let me give you a clue – it’s called “Matt Doyle’s iPhone”:
One end of cable is in iPhone. Other end is in Mac. What more do you want – blood?!
That’s funny – it worked half an hour ago:
Again – it was fine yesterday. So WTF is iTunes Helper? And why does iTunes need help today?
Override, override!!!
Not the cheeriest dialog on a Monday morning:
Not sure what the hell this means, but it doesn’t sound good:
I’ll remap your record identifiers in a minute, mate:
Backups are for wusses anyway:
I make that 14 different errors so far, and counting. Not bad!!
If I get any new ones I’ll add them to the list… 🙂
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November 27th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Love the one that claims iTunes couldn’t sync to “Matt Doyle’s iPhone” because a connection couldn’t be made.
If a connection couldn’t be made, how’d you get the iPhone’s name (or the fact that it was even an iPhone)?!?
November 27th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
@jsk: Good point! That is a bit of a puzzler… 🙂
November 27th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
That is a collection of rare geeky genius mate!
November 28th, 2009 at 2:13 am
I don’t have any dialogs to add, but I do have issues:
1. iPhone starts showing numbers only, no names in Favorites and Contacts. To fix it sync using iTunes instead of the cloud.
2. Fixed. Now I see every contact name, twice!
Have had this happen repeatedly!
November 28th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
@Simon: Why thank you! 🙂
@James Lee: Haven’t had that one yet! This might help possibly? http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/archive/index.php/t-717414.html
November 29th, 2009 at 6:51 am
I’m assuming you’ve tried restoring your iPhone. Or even re-installing your OS (archive should suffice).
No-one should have that many sync errors. I don’t get any, ever.
November 29th, 2009 at 7:01 am
@Gideon: Wow, really? Either you’re very lucky, or I’m very unlucky (or both!). 🙂
Yes I have restored my iPhone a couple of times (when I got the “Silver Apple of Death”). I might try an OS reinstall if the errors become a real problem, but right now they’re more of a minor annoyance than a problem.
My gut feeling is that none of these sync errors are that serious – they’re just minor glitches as Apple irons out bugs. For example, the “disk could not be read from or written to” was completely bogus – the disk was fine, and the sync worked fine the second time.
99% of the time, the sync works when I try it again.
Also I do tend to push my Mac and iPhone to the limit a lot of the time (e.g. attempting to sync while I have 10 apps open including Firefox with 20 tabs and VMware running Windows, and my iPhone nearly out of free space). This probably doesn’t help! 🙂
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Iphone sync error.
This iphone could not be synced an unknown error occurred (-39)
July 27th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
@John: Ha ha, I’d never seen that error before, but got it twice myself yesterday! Maybe it’s new in iTunes 9.2.1…
August 12th, 2010 at 5:39 am
That’s it! That is the one that I am getting and I have no idea what to do about it. I REALLY don’t want to restore my iPhone. This is the only place online that I can find that even references that error!
August 26th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
@Erika: It wasn’t a problem for me, just annoying, and it’s gone away now (probably since updating either iOS or iTunes at a guess).