iTunes Could not Backup iPhone Because iPhone Disconnected

24 July 2009 by Vinay 13 Comments

iTunes could not back up the iPhone because the iPhone disconnected. If you are getting this annoying message while syncing your iPhone ( jailbreaked), follow the methods given below to solve your problem. This problem is occurred while iTunes gets an error while backing up data of your iPhone. Before doing any thing you are advised to manually back up essential data (SMS, Call Records, Notes, Contacts etc.) manually by following this guide Backup iPhone Contacts, SMS, Notes & Call History. This error can be caused by MobileInstallation Patch, previous iTunes backup etc.

Method One (Uninstall the Mobile Installation) :

Uninstall Mobile Installation Patch if you have installed. Also uninstall cracked application if any. As i said in my previous posts keep your jailbreaking in legal limits and never install cracked applications because developer deserves respect for their hard work.
Uninstall and reboot your phone if works well otherwise follow method two.

Method Two (Delete the iTunes preferences) :

For Mac users >>>

1) On the Windows, open iTunes and choose Edit >> Preferences >> Devices from the iTunes Menu.
2) Use that screen to delete the iphone backup(s) listed.
To reset the Sync preferences
1) Find the Reset Sync History button on the same screen where you deleted the iPhone backup.
2) Then click the button that says “Reset Sync History…”

For Mac users >>>

1) On the Mac, open iTunes and choose preferences from the iTunes Menu.
2) Then click on the iPhone icon
3) Use that screen to delete the iphone backup(s) listed.
To reset the iSync preferences
1) Find the iSync application in the applications folder and launch it.
2) Choose preferences from the iSync menu.
3) Then click the button that says “Reset Sync History…”

13 Comments »

Anand Patel said:

Thanks, I’ve been having this problem since I first jailbroke my phone last week and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was after spending hours looking around. This worked perfectly for me so thanks!

I personally didn’t have a mobileinstallation installed but I think the problem came along with either appsync 3.0 or anything that installed when installous was, just be sure to move all of those just to be safe.

# 24 July 2009 at 11:06 pm

MikeJones said:

Thank you so much, you just saved my life

# 13 August 2009 at 7:25 am

Ringo said:

i hv tried, but it doesn’t work for me.
What can i do?

# 13 August 2009 at 6:49 pm

Gustavo said:

Have a 3g jailbroken iphone and didnt have mobileinstallation, but do have Installous and a couple of cracked apps, it had never happened to me before, so I’m puzzled as to why it happened now, but anyway your post help me a lot, thanks

# 25 August 2009 at 10:56 am

Dan said:

Again, unfortunately this doesn’t work for me (Mac with snow leopard)

# 30 September 2009 at 1:26 pm

Wayne said:

My problem appears to be caused by corrupted “notes” on the iphone which the above procedure did not fix. Still says phone was disconnected. NOtes are jumbled and crash the app when I try to delete or add new notes.

# 17 October 2009 at 10:06 pm

dandy6z said:

i’ve got the same error and i use a mac but this solution doesn’t work
any thing els

# 25 October 2009 at 9:01 pm

Trivedi said:

PLEASE CAN ANYONE HELP!!

I have been getting this message for a while…

“iTunes could not backup the iPhone (3GS-3.1.2-JB) because the iPhone disconnected”

At 1st I didn’t care but its been 2 months since the last backup. I have gotten new apps and made new changes. I have aptbackup but would like to get the backup from itunes for other things. PLEASE, someone here has to know how to fix this. NOT 1 person in all the iphone forums I read have a solution to this.. This is not for an updated iphone.. this is out of the box 3.1.2-3GS, which I jailbroke using blackra1n..

ANYONE???

# 23 December 2009 at 3:11 pm

Paulie said:

I have the same problem. Hacked with Black Rain. Getting message that iPhone is disconnected, when it clearly is in iTunes??? The phone will sync contacts, etc…but will not back up!! Solution above did not help, and as I’ve deleted the backups…I don’t have any.
Lil help anyone!!

# 7 January 2010 at 5:28 am

Davis said:

Didn’t work for me. I backed up the essentials like it said, but I now have no iTunes backups, and it still won’t sync. Any ideas?

# 16 January 2010 at 11:19 pm

Joe said:

This anoying message comes up to me once a month or so. I usually restore from the previous backup and it fixes the problem for a while. But restoring takes an awefull load of time, so I tried your method.

Nope, didn’t work for me.

At first, this idea of deleting old backups didn’t sound good to me, and i was right. I tried so hard, deleting all apps, even though my iPhone is not cracked in any way, reboot, resync… and I ended up with a freezed iTunes (yes, on a Mac) and a crashed iphone that wouldn’t boot at all. And since I previously deleted all backups… I guess you can imagine how fustrated I was.

Hopefully I have Time Machine and could copy my previous iPhone backup back to itunes. I then boot the iPhone in recovery mode and restored it from my old backup, as I used to do. But wasted a couple extra hours and lost some data on the way.

# 27 January 2010 at 3:07 am

str said:

Oh man, I just got this problem. So annyoing… WTF?
So everything was fine when I used OS 3.0 on my iPhone 3G. Recently I updated it to 3.1.3 using PwnageTool and haven’t been able to back it up since then! Sync is fine but no back up. I followed your directions and now I don’t even have the old backups. I don’t have any cracked apps or the MobileInstallation Patch (never did). I do have Installous and all the other stuff to install those apps. Any ideas what else can be wrong?

# 22 March 2010 at 8:26 pm

qwiky said:

I tried this but it didn’t work.
But I noticed when I removed all my cracked app, my iphone backup w/o an error. SO I installed my apps by four at a time until I found out one of my cracked app (Tetris) was the cause to this madness.
That’s what I did, hope this helps

# 20 September 2010 at 11:40 pm