being deathly ill with the dread lurgi, i was asleep at the switch the last two times i sync’d my phone. both times, sync completed without needing to sandbag MDCrashReportTool. i’d even started activity monitor to administer the chop.
phone is updated to 17.3. perhaps something was fixed in that update?
are others successfully syncing these days or am i again an outlier?
cheers!
Just gets uglier every time I try…
This happened to me last week on MacStudioUltra.
Switched to different USB cable and didn’t make a difference.
Switched to different USB-C port and it worked.
Don’t have any idea why.
Hmm…just been meaning to try that. I’ve got a Studio Ultra too. I’ve been using USB-A ports, all of which worked in Monterey (even the Echo 15 dock and my DAS keyboard), because it was the cable that came w/ my iPhone 12 mini. Coincidentally found a USB-C-to-Lightning cable in my wife’s desk this weekend…hmm, indeed.
Yeah, I think they’ve fixed this. I was using Wi-Fi sync exclusively, resisted the urge to run my script to kill MDCrashReportTool, and it worked; I watched the entire sync from the moment I hit the Sync button and it was on step 3 of 4 in under five seconds. This was just after triggering a backup (and entering the passcode, sigh) which went absolutely perfectly and very fast. I was strangely impressed. As this was also affecting Windows users, I suspect Apple changed something that broke in their device sync support.
Swapping cables and ports didn’t help here. Still massive corruption when syncing under Sonoma.
Exact same issue today again.
On a whim, I took the exact same USB cable and just plugged it into another port on my 14" MBP. And voila, it synced just like that. Go figure. 
reported a while back that sync was working without intervention. if only. it maybe worked twice. every time since, have to sandbag MDCrashReportTool.
Truthfully not been having issues for a while now, over Wi-Fi at least where I most want it to work. If there are separate issues to the MDCrashReportTool issues, I never ran into those. Bummer for those still affected; I can only really suggest trying Wi-Fi syncing.
Wifi syncing used to be a lot more valuable when you could initiate it from your iPhone. There used to be a toggle for that under Settings > General. But then Apple removed it (around iOS 13?) and now you actually need to walk up to your Mac to initiate a sync because you can only control sync from the Mac end. 
unfortunately, wifi is a whole other world of pain in my setup.
i’ll be moving to a new house that’ll be thoroughly wired with cat6. may end some of my pain and suffering although i’m sure the -er- boffins at apple will manage to break something else that i depend on for happy computing.
@Sebby, you said you had a script for nuking MDCrashReportTool? if so, could you share it?
Nice. If it’s not already in-place when you move in, my recommendation for such a house is:
Install a Gigabit or better Ethernet switch in or near your wiring closet where all the jacks come together. Make sure it’s big enough for all the rooms. I suspect a 16-port switch will be big enough. Hopefully not too expensive for your budget.
Since this will be what ties all the rooms together, this should be the fastest switch in the house. If you plan on using something faster than gigabit and can’t afford switches at that speed everywhere, you should put the fastest switch here.
Install smaller switches in any room where you will have more than one wired device. A 4- or 8-port switch will probably be good enough for most rooms.
If you want to set up a Wi-Fi mesh system, connect the nodes to this Ethernet backbone (using an Ethernet switch if you will be putting other wired devices in the same location). So they won’t be forced to use your wireless bandwidth to pass data to each other.
@Simon Yes, tragic loss. Nowadays Wi-Fi sync is just a convenience, at best it saves you from having to connect actual cables, and it might save you from forgetting because a sync should trigger when you put down your device to charge. And ultimately that’s good enough to make sure that my latest tunes/audiobook has synced over to my phone by the time I actually leave the flat with it.
@henry.crun I don’t have it anymore, but it was literally a tight loop in a shell script, something like this …
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
killall -9 MDCrashReportTool >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 5
done
I was going to run this from launchd, but I never got around to making the plist, so I just left the script in my home folder and launched it whenever syncing stalled for any reason. You could presumably do something even simpler with KeyboardMaestro, or FastScripts, or even embed the script into an Automator workflow; I have shortcuts in VoiceOver to launch arbitrary apps/scripts with a key so that’s what I used. I hope it helps.
the broken crash report tool has been unbroken for a couple minor releases. yay! finally.
but now what’s driving me spare is that the [skip backup] button appears after a few seconds of starting a sync and depending on when and how many times you bonk that button, may or mayn’t skip the backup. sometime you have to tap cancel on the phone. worse, sometimes you have to also click cancel on the host computer.
complained to apple feedback (but of course, that’s actually apple music service which i DO NOT use) but will probably be ignored as is the apple way.
btw: good news that google is guilty of monopolising search. maybe the enshittification of that will ease. maybe big corpses like apple &c will become responsive to customer requests again.
if wishes were horses, beggars would ride …