Having trouble restoring backup of my iPhone I'd been having a few issues with my iPhone 4 (one of the main being that apps wouldn't open and turning it off and on again to remedy this resulted in me losing all of my contacts in my address book). When attempting to restore my iPhone, it sometimes causes my computer screen to become distorted and freeze my computer.

I'd been on iOS 5.1 (?) for a while (having put of updating it due to lack of space) and my brother suggested updating to the most recent iOS. I did this, but afterwards, my phone said it had to reset back to factory settings. I reset it, but when I went to restore my backup, I got the message “iTunes could not restore the iPod 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer.” Having looked around, people seemed to suggest that I needed to clear some disk space on my laptop. I've done this, and I have 217 GB free, so I can't see why this should be an issue now, but I'm still having the same problem.

Can anyone suggest a solution?
The simplest thing to do is to take your iPhone to a new computer and see if you can determine if the problem is the iPhone / OS on that device or the problem lies with your computer.

Also - you might check iTunes to be sure you have the old backup stored safely (perhaps backing up the computer itself) 

iTunes places the backup files in the following places:


Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/  
Windows XP: \Documents and Settings(username)\Application Data\Apple  Computer\MobileSync\Backup\  
Windows Vista and Windows 7: \Users(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ 


Once you know which of the two parties is not working correctly, you should be able to take your troubleshooting to the next step and consult the site here or Apple's support articles for how to proceed:


http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/assistant/restore/
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/assistant/itunes/