The Download
- You can move your iPhone backup from your Mac to an external hard drive to save space.
- Use Mac’s Terminal to permanently change where your iPhone backups are saved.
- Check that backups have worked by looking at the date modified on your external drive.
If you regularly back up your iPhone data to a Mac, you might find your space is limited. Although Apple doesn’t facilitate straightforward backups to external hard drives, it’s possible. This guide shows you how to back up using iOS 13 and macOS Catalina or later.
How to Find Your Current Backup on MacOS
Because of the complexity, we’ve broken down what needs to be done before moving your iPhone backup to an external hard drive into multiple steps.
First, you need to locate where the backup is stored on your Mac. It’s easy to find.
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Connect your phone to your computer with a USB cable so it appears in your Finder.
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Choose your iPhone. It will appear under the Locations heading in the Finder.
Use iTunes to find your iPhone if you’re using a macOS version older than macOS Catalina.
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Click Manage Backups.
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Long-press the Control key and click the backup name you want. It may be named “Backup” or it may be a long string of letters and numbers.
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In the drop-down menu, select Show in Finder.
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You’ve successfully tracked down the backup.
How to Move iPhone Backup to an External Hard Drive
Now you’ve found your backup, you need to move it to your external hard drive. This step is pretty simple.
Ensure your external hard drive is plugged in!
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Go to the Finder window that displays your iOS backup.
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Select the Backup folder.
It will either be called Backup or consist of a series of numbers and letters.
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Drag it to the external hard drive under Locations in the Finder sidebar.
You might need to enter your administrator password to complete this step.
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Rename the iOS backup folder on the external hard drive to ios_backup.
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Switch back to the original finder window and rename the old backup to old_backup.
If you want, you can stop right there and repeat the process outlined above whenever you want to back up your iPhone to an external drive. If you are uncomfortable working with the Mac Terminal, that’s probably your safest choice.
Can You Change Where Your Mac Saves iPhone Backups?
If you want, you can permanently change where the Mac saves your iPhone backups. The process involves being comfortable changing a few background settings on your Mac via the Terminal command. If you’ve never dealt with Terminal before, it can be intimidating as it’s powerful and not exactly user-friendly.
You could disrupt your Mac’s backup process, so it’s advisable to perform a full system backup via Time Machine first to retrace your steps if necessary.
Changing Mac’s location for iPhone backups is the trickiest part of this process. To always have your iPhone back up to an external hard drive, you need to create a symlink so that your Mac knows where to look for future backups.
Creating a symlink isn’t essential as you can manually move your backups across, but it’s much easier if you set up your Mac to do this automatically. Plus, it means you don’t have to worry about having enough free space on your Mac’s internal hard drive to perform the backup.
Changing the backup location is straightforward if you follow these steps, but it does require attention to detail. You’ll need to adjust some permissions on your Mac first.
Update Permissions on Your Mac
Here’s how to adjust those permissions.
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Click the Apple icon.
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Select System Preferences.
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Click Security & Privacy.
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Select Privacy.
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Click the Lock to make changes.
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Enter your admin password.
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Select Full Disk Access.
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Click the plus (+) sign.
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Scroll through your applications and select Terminal.
Change iPhone Backup Locations
Now you’ve completed that step, here’s how to change iPhone backup location on Mac.
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Open Terminal.
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Paste this code, ensuring you change the relevant parts to the name of your external hard drive.
ln -s /Volumes/**yourexternalharddrivename**/ios_backup ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/
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Select Return.
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Close Terminal.
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You’ve now made a symlink between the new folder and the old folder that contains your backup.
How Do I Know the New iPhone Backup Worked?
When handling backups, it’s important to ensure you’ve completed everything correctly. To verify, select Back Up Now from the iPhone location in Finder. Once complete, open the iOS Backup folder on your external hard drive and confirm the Date Modified has updated to the current time.
How to Disable Automatic Backups
The downside to having a backup on your external hard drive is if you don’t always have the external hard drive plugged in, you can have issues. Here’s how to disable automatic backups so you only back up your iPhone when you want to do it.
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Open Finder.
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In the Locations section, select your iPhone.
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Uncheck the Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected box.
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Remember to perform manual backups regularly.
FAQ
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How do I format an external hard drive?
To format a hard drive in Windows, open Disk Management, right-click the disk, and choose Format. Name the drive. Under File system, choose NTFS. Under Allocation unit size, choose Default. Uncheck Perform a quick format so that a “standard format” is performed.
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How can I backup a Mac to an external hard drive?
To back up your Mac to an external drive, use Time Machine. Connect the drive and set it as your preferred backup drive from System Preferences > Time Machine > Select Backup Disk. From there, choose manual or automated backups that start at a specific interval when you connect the external drive to your Mac.
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