If iTunes Backups of your iPhone and iPad are taking up too much space on your internal hard drive (Macintosh HD), then here’s a handy guide to move iOS backups to an external hard drive.If you have traditionally synced your iPhone or iPad with the iTunes app on your Mac, there’s a very good chance that iTunes has been backing up all the data on your iOS device. Before Apple introduced the ability to back up all the data on your iPhone or iPad to iCloud, iTunes was the only recommended method of automatically backing up your iPhone and iPad to your Mac. Show
Unfortunately, if you have been backing up your iOS device to iTunes for a few years now, your Mac is probably being overburdened by the large file size of these backups. Over the last few years, the storage space available on iPhone and iPad has been growing substantially, and we now have 256 GB and 512 GB devices commonly seen in the market. On the other hand, as Apple pushes for SSD internal storage on Macs, the in-built storage on Macs has been shrinking to 256 GB or 512 GB as well. You don’t have to be a genius at math to see the problem here. Your iPhone and iPad backups via iTunes will soon be big enough to not fit onto the internal hard drive of your Mac. Similarly, you may be already starting to feel the pinch and might want to move these backups away from the internal drive, so as to not run out of storage on your Mac. If this is the case, here’s a handy guide that explains how to move your iPhone and iPad backups to an external drive, so that you can clear up storage space on your Mac’s internal drive and instead back them up onto your choice of of an external hard drive, be it a portable hard drive, USB pen drive, or a NAS drive. Now, as easy or as trivial as it sounds, moving your iTunes backups to an alternate location isn’t exactly straightforward, because Apple doesn’t provide you with an easy way to do this. So here is a step-by-step, three-part guide to help you move your iPhone or iPad backups to an external hard drive. First, you should probably understand where are iPhone backups stored on a Mac. Part I — Where are iPhone Backups Stored on a MacIn order to clear or delete old iPhone or iPad backups from your Mac or move them to an external hard drive, it’s important to know where iOS backups are stored on a Mac. Your iOS device, irrespective of what iPhone you have (such as the iPhone X, iPhone Xr, iPhone Xs, etc.) or what iPad you have (such as iPad mini, iPad, iPad Air, iPad Pro), all your data is backed up on your Mac via the iTunes app. And the iTunes app stores all this backup data in the same location — in a folder called MobileSync. To locate iPhone or iPad backup store on a Mac, follow these steps.
Now that we know where iTunes stores the iOS device backups on a Mac, let’s take a look at how to move iPhone or iPad backups to an external hard drive. Part II — How to Move iPhone or iPad Backups to an External Hard DriveNext, we’ll copy any existing backups you have over to the external drive. In order to transfer old iPhone or iPad backups from your Mac to an external hard drive, follow these steps.
We’re not done yet. While we’ve copied your existing iTunes backups to an external drive, we still have to ensure that the future backups of your iPhone or iPad are also copied to the new location and not the old one iTunes was using until now. For that, we’ll proceed with Part III of the process detailed below. Part III — Create a Symlink for iTunes Backups on External Hard DriveThis is the part that may be slightly confusing and a bit difficult for some users, but don’t worry. We’ll guide you through the entire process so that you can finish this entire guide and have iTunes automatically backup your iPhone or iPad to an external hard drive. In this part of the process, we’re going to create what is known as a Symlink to tell iTunes to create backups of the iPhones or iPads on the Backup folder we copied to the external hard drive. To do this, we first need to find out the name of your External hard drive. For example, your internal drive on your Mac is likely called ‘Macintosh HD’. Similarly, your external drive, when you connect it to your Mac, has a name associated with it. You’ll see this name on your Desktop, or in the Sidebar of your Finder window. Note down this name, as you will need to use it in the steps below.
ln -s /Volumes/NameofExternalDrive/iOSBackup/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
That’s the end of the difficult part. If you did everything right, your iTunes app is now programmed to back up your iPhone or iPad to your external drive. Caveat Lector: How to Disable Automatic Sync & Backups in iTunesThere’s a minor yet important step that we recommend you take before signing off on this guide. By default, iTunes is set to automatically backup and sync your iOS device when you connect it to your Mac. Because we’re now backing up the data to an external drive, it is important that the drive be connected to your Mac when iTunes backs up your iPhone or iPad. If you have a Desktop Mac like the Mac mini or iMac, this is less of a concern to you. But for portable Macs like MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, you’re very likely to connect external drives only when required. If your external drive isn’t connected, the backup will fail. To ensure that you don’t run into this problem, we’ll disable the option in iTunes to automatically back up.
From now, you will have to manually backup iPhone or iPad using iTunes. How do I store my Apple music library on an external hard drive?Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive. From the main iTunes menu, go to iTunes > Preferences then click Advanced. ... . Also in the Advanced Preferences windows, click Change.. From the iTunes Media Folder Location windows, navigate to the new drive (Backup Plus for example).. |