Is there any way to backup and restore your iOS apps *without* re-downloading all of them? I've got a problem. The first step, as they say, is acceptance. My problem, is apps.

I've got over four hundred on my phone, generally. It floats around that count, anyway. I think, perhaps, it comes from when I was a Boy Scout: “be prepared, zing-zing bong-bong,” and all that.

But in all seriousness: waiting two or three days, without leaving WiFi range (meaning, since I travel a lot, two or three days being phone-less while it sits at home) for all of my apps to re-download themselves … is painful, at best; and lifestyle-restricting at worst.

I'm a techie. I know quite a bit about these things, generally; and I know that there must be some way, complex as it may be, to backup the actual .app folders and restore the same, without excruciatingly-slowly re-downloading dozens of gigabytes of apps every single time I drop my phone, or update to a new iOS beta, or suffer some other data-calamity.

Anybody know?
You can backup the iphone from itunes from a mac/windows pc and the when you need to restore choose to restore from an itunes backup.