You may come across situation when you want to backup large amount of your iPhone or iPad data. The best way would be to take an external device and back up the data. This guide shows you How to Back up iPhone or iPad Data to External Drive.
How to Back up iPhone or iPad Data to External Drive
- Prerequisites:
- Get a USB 3 or USB 2 external hard drive.
- Make a folder for your iTunes backup
- Now close iTunes.
- Go to Finder
- Then press Command+Shift+G to open the Go To Folder field.
- Now type the following the Go To Folder field:
- ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/
- Then you need to search for the Backup folder in this directory
- Now copy that to the folder you just made on the external drive.
- Once you have copied, go back to the location ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/), and rename Backup to Backup-Old.
- Then navigate to /Applications/Utilities/ and find and launch the Terminal application
- Type the following command [change the names of your external drive and folder as appropriate]
- ln -s /Volumes/FileStorage/iTunesExternalBackupSymLink/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
- Then hit the return key.
- Now quit Terminal.
- Then return to “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/” in the Finder to confirm the symbolic link was created. The Backup folder should now be a generic file with an arrow on it. This denotes that now there is a direct link between that Backup and the location specified on the external hard disk.
- Now you can open iTunes and connect the iPhone or iPad to the computer.
- Select the device within iTunes.
- Then select This Computer as the backup location.
- Then choose Back Up Now to start the backup process.
- Once the back up completes in iTunes, verify the backup folder in the external drive.
- The backup will be a hexadecimal named sub-directory in the folder that you created there.
That’s all you need to do. So the next time you go for a backup, just follow the above mentioned steps to get the work done.