iPhone Restore from iTunes Backup Taking Forever How To Fix This

Sometimes a peculiar situation can happen where the iTunes “Restoring iPhone from backup” process can offer an extraordinarily long time remaining, sometimes in excess of 20 hours.

If you see an excessively long time remaining estimate when attempting to restore an iPhone from backup, it may be the result of an error, and with a few troubleshooting steps you can remedy the problem and dramatically speed up the iTunes backup restore process.

Before getting started, realize that it can take a while to complete a device restore from an iTunes backup. Waiting an hour or two to complete is fairly normal depending on the size of the backup file. What is abnormal are iTunes backup restore estimates with time remaining at excessive lengths of time, often continuously ticking up past 15 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours, etc, those situations are indicative of a problem. Also keep in mind we are talking about restoring backups made to iTunes on a computer, not iCloud backup restores which can take a significant amount of time to complete on slower internet connections. The following troubleshooting steps only apply to iTunes restores made to and from a computer directly to an iPhone over a USB connection.

How to Fix Excessively Long iTunes Restoring from Backup Time Remaining Problem

1. Disconnect the iPhone from the computer and USB connection
2. Update iTunes to the most recent version if you have not done so already
3. Reboot the iPhone
4. Reboot the computer
5. When the computer boots back up again, launch iTunes as usual
6. On the iPhone, go through the restore/setup process again and choose to “Restore from Backup with iTunes”
7. Connect the iPhone to the computer with a USB cable and let the restore from backup proceed as expected

I personally ran into this problem when restoring and setting up a new iPhone X via iTunes from a freshly made iPhone Plus backup. The first attempt to migrate and restore the iPhone X with the backup in iTunes gave a time remaining estimate of 8 hours which slowly grew to 20 hours. After following the steps detailed above, I was able to fix the problem and get the entire backup restore process to complete in about an hour for a 128 GB backup being restored to the new iPhone – a reasonable time given the giant backup size. After searching around a bit I realized a fair amount of other users are experiencing the same problem with iPhone X, iPhone 8, and many older iPhones too over time.

Before, where iTunes restoring from backup estimated time was 20 hours:

And after the fix, taking about an hour to complete the restore from iTunes backup process:

For what it’s worth, this is not a particularly new issue, and in fact users have been reporting this problem for years on Apple Discussions, so it’s not a complaint to any particular iPhone model, iTunes version, or iOS version. There does not seem to be a particularly consistent reason why the iPhone “restoring from backup” process can erroneously report an excessive backup restore time, but the good news is its usually fairly easy to fix by jumping through the troubleshooting hoops outlined above.