Now that iOS 4.2 is finally released I thought it would be an optimal time to upgrade my 16GB iPad to the latest and greatest OS. Like most Apple upgrades I’ve encountered in the past I figured this would be a fairly painless process. I guessed I’d be running new OS in roughly a half an hour. I have the most basic model of iPad after all.

When I started the process the first time I waited about an hour or so and saw a progress bar at what looked to be maybe 5% complete. I figured something in the upgrade process had frozen and I would need to restart the process. So I cancelled what was running and restarted iTunes then started again. This time I waited about two hours. The progress bar still only appeared to be about as far as the first time. At this point I guessed something was up. So I did a little searching on the friendly Google.

As part of an OS upgrade Apple forces a device backup. This is a resonable and probably wise thing to do. The only problem is that they have the slowest backup procedure of any modern system I’ve ever seen. This is a known issue that they will have hopefully fixed in 4.2.

After removing any magazine type applications I had installed I restarted the upgrade process. This time I let it keep running. Then about 20 hours later it was finally complete. So be aware that if your upgrade seems to be frozen it is likely still going but just taking a lot longer than you’d expect. I am using less than 10GB of space on my 16GB iPad so many users may see this take significantly longer than I did. Be prepared to allow this upgrade to go for a full 24 hours or more.

With this type of experience on the only device they have, I would hate to see what would happen if Apple had to support many different devices like Google or Microsoft will for tablets within the next year. Hopefully this bug has been fixed in the latest release so the upgrade to iOS 5 will be much smoother.