Ok having Read This thread – lets summarise :
Itunes is as usual bad and tries to stunt the user in terms of file access or controlling anything
when I choose to “SYNC” or “APPLY” that does not necessarily mean I wish to “BACKUP” – such two events I would prefer to control separately
When people manually choose to “BACKUP” that does not mean they wish to incrementally throw information away and remove any older backups ?
As it maybe from the users perspective they are trying to create a restore point to come back to later ?
And apple assume your running the over animated obscure file format drive filling and wasting > ‘time machine’ guff in ordered to be covered in their eco system. I like to see my files when backed up, not having to view them through an idiot party interface, which may disappear or stop working at some point in the future, and wastes processor cycles showing me an a wastefully animated starfield as I’m not the kind of idiot who responds to such guff, remote controlling a machines full screen animated time machine interface on a 27″ screen – worst internet bandwidth waste known to man – yuck.
iphone backups are singular per device and incremental and you are only covered if your running apples heinous time machine
you can never roll back to an earlier software or reinstall the software your ios device came with unless your an arcane nut who stored some SH blobs and want to hoick about – searching endless – often locked apple forum posts or the internet in general.
anything apple does will always be stored in some user incomprehensible format with backup file names like
6c166843dc0d457dc6c166843dc0d457dc
you can always trust apple not to do anything in a sensible way
why because apple don’t really like users or files or sanity
I can see a future in which apple deliberately tries to obfuscate the idea of “the file” from the users view – I dont trust apple with that.
rinse repeat the usual guff and btw the iTunes 12 slurps D***** D*** < make your own insult up < / censor this apple