Back up Your IPhone to External Hard Drive Using Terminal Command
If you have an iPhone with a lot of storage, you may not have enough space to back up it locally on your hard drive, especially if you are using a laptop SSD. OS X Daily notes that with a little Terminal magic, you can set up iTunes on your Mac to back up your iPhone to an external hard drive.
While many of us simply back up our phones to iCloud, this isn’t exactly the best option, especially if you want to keep control of those backups. So, locally is the best way. For local backups, you use iTunes, which somewhat annoyingly determines the folder that it will use for backing up without your participation. Fortunately, you can work around this by using a symbolic link in OS X:
- On the external hard drive, create a new folder where you want to save the backup. Name it something you can remember, such as “iPhoneBackup”.
- Open a new Finder window, then press Command + Shift + G. Type this into the
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/field that appears then find a folder named “Backup”. - Copy the “Backup” folder to the folder you created in step 1. Then rename the original Backup folder to “Backup-Old”. If you need to save space, you can delete the “Backup-Old” folder after making sure your backups are working in iTunes.
- Now start Terminal and enter the following command, replacing “ExternalHardDriveName” with your external hard drive information:
ln -s /Volumes/ExternalHardDriveName/iPhoneBackup/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync - Go ahead and open iTunes, connect your iOS device and back up your iOS device as usual . The backup file should now be on your external hard drive.
From now on, iTunes will always back up and restore your iOS device from this external hard drive, so make sure it is connected to your computer when you back up. Go to OS X Daily for more information on the backup process and another way to do it.
How to Back Up iPhone to External Hard Drive on Mac OS X | OS X Daily