If anything on your iPhone gets corrupted or accidentally deleted, it can be reassuring to have a backup on your computer ready to restore your iPhone. However, these backups can take up a lot of space, so many people may want to move their backups to an external drive. But how do you do this?
To move your iPhone backup to an external hard drive, you first need to locate it. An iTunes backup on Windows will be in your %appdata% folder, and a backup on Mac can be found by selecting your iPhone in Finder. Then you can copy and paste the backup into your external hard drive.
If you own a Mac, it is also possible to have your backups automatically saved onto your external hard drive. Although, this is a little more complicated and involves typing a command in your terminal. Let’s get into your options in more detail so you can save some space on your computer.
Can You Back Up Your iPhone to an External Hard Drive?
If you’re the type of person to back up your iPhone’s data onto your computer regularly, You might find that these backups are taking up a significant portion of your computer’s data. The solution to this problem is an external hard drive like this one from Western Digital (on Amazon).
An external hard drive is just what it sounds like. The internal hard drive inside your computer is used to store data in your computer, while an external hard drive stores data outside your computer.
When you plug your external hard drive into your computer, it treats it like another hard drive. This means that nothing stops you from backing up your iPhone’s files to this external hard drive rather than the internal one. You just need to know how to do it.
How to Locate Your Current Backup
One of the easiest ways to back up your iPhone to an external hard drive is to just back it up onto your computer and then move the backed-up files onto your external hard drive. However, before you can do this, you need to know where your backed-up files are.
This process will change a little depending on whether your iPhone is being backed up via iCloud or iTunes, but don’t worry. Let’s go through the steps for both of these methods.
Using MacOS
If you’ve backed up your iPhone’s files onto your Mac, finding them will be easy. All you need to do is use the Finder tool.
- First, open Finder and choose your iPhone in the Locations section on the left.
- On the page that appears, you should see an option that says Manage Backups. Select this, and you should see a list of backups located on your Mac.
- Next, long-press the Control key while clicking the name of the backup you would like to move.
- After doing this, you should see a drop-down menu. In this drop-down menu, select Show in Finder.
- This will bring up a Finder window showing the files from your iPhone’s backup. From here, all you need to do is copy and paste your backup files from your Mac to your external hard drive.
- If you don’t know where to find your external hard drive, begin by opening a new window in Finder. On the left, under Locations, you should see the name of your external hard drive. Just select this, and you now have a location to paste your backup files.
Using iTunes
If you have a Windows PC, chances are you have to back up your iPhone’s files through iTunes. Although, this method is also possible if you have an older Mac that needs to back up iPhones through iTunes.
Let’s go through how to find these files on both iTunes on a Windows PC and iTunes on a Mac.
iTunes on Windows
Despite not being an Apple product, finding the Backup folder for your iPhone on your Windows PC is very simple. All you have to do is use the handy search bar.
- On a Windows 10 computer, select the search bar next to the start button in the bottom right corner of the screen. (On Windows 8, you would choose the magnifying glass in the top right.)
- In this search bar, type %appdata% and hit Enter. This should bring up a folder where you should see your iPhone’s backups.
- From here, all you have to do is copy and paste them into your external hard drive.
iTunes on Mac
Finding your backup folder on a Mac is even easier than on Windows. Again, all you have to do is use the search bar.
Begin by selecting the magnifying glass located in the menu bar. This should open a text box where you either need to type or copy and paste this command ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/.
This should bring up a window where you should see a folder named Backup. This folder contains your backup data, so you can copy and paste it into your external drive.
How to Change the Location of Your Backups
It is possible to change where your iPhone’s backups are saved so that you don’t need to copy and paste them to your external drive. However, this is only possible on a Mac and involves using the terminal, so this method isn’t for everybody.
First, you need to begin by changing your Mac’s permissions. To do this:
- Click on the Apple icon in the top left corner, select System Preferences, and Security & Privacy.
- You should see four options at the top in the window that appears. Select Privacy and click the lock at the bottom to make changes. Here, you will need to enter your admin password to proceed.
- Once you’ve done this, select Full Disk Access and click the + sign under the window on the right.
- This should bring up a list of the applications on your Mac. Scroll through these and Terminal.
- Now you need to open your terminal and copy and paste the code below into it. Make sure to change the external hard drive name to the actual name of your external hard drive.
ln -s /Volumes/**externalharddrivename**/ios_backup ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/
- After pasting the code, hit Return and then close the terminal. This should have made it so that your backups automatically save to your external hard drive.
How to Disable Automatic Backups
Automatic backups can be good for potentially saving any important data on your iPhone, but they can take up a lot of data on your computer. They can also overwrite the backups you already have, which some people may not want. So here’s how to turn off these automatic backups on your Mac.
- Begin by opening Finder and select your phone in the Locations section.
- On the page that appears, you should see an option that says Automatically Sync when this iPhone is Connected. Uncheck this box, and your phone will no longer back up automatically.