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Backup your iPhone in iTunes straight to External Hard Drive

Hi there, recently purchased a MacBook Air (250GB SSD) to

replace my old iMac (2009).  On the old

iMac I was able to easily set up iTunes to back up both mine and my wifes

iPhones (both iPhone 8 with 256gb memory) straight to my 2TB external hard

drive so it didn’t take up on the memory on my ageing iMac.  I have tried to do the same on the new

MacBook Air and followed the advice to create an alias ‘Backup’ so that it does

this, however every time I go to back up my phone it says that the ‘backup is

corrupt’ and I need to ‘delete the old versions of the back up in iTunes

preferences’.  In preferences no previous

back ups exist, as I have never done them on this MacBook and I have checked in

Finder to ensure there are none existing. 

This is realty frustrating, does anything know a simple way to do

this?  Or has anyone experienced this

issue before? 

MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 2, 2019 2:32 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 2, 2019 3:22 AM

See Relocate iOS device backups. Review the rest of the Make a split library portable user tip for advice on organizing the library on external storage.


A recent change to the forum software has messed up the formatting of the user tip somewhat. The terminal command should look like this:


ln -s "/Volumes/<New Volume>/MobileSync/Backup" "/Users/<User>/Library/Application Support/MobileSync"


Where <New Volume> is the name of the volume you want to store the data on, and <User> is the name of your profile. If there are spaces in the path wrap with quotes or escape with backslash. It is probably easier to type in ln -s then drag and drop the two folders onto the command line in turn.


tt2

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5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 2, 2019 3:22 AM in response to sotonkona

See Relocate iOS device backups. Review the rest of the Make a split library portable user tip for advice on organizing the library on external storage.


A recent change to the forum software has messed up the formatting of the user tip somewhat. The terminal command should look like this:


ln -s "/Volumes/<New Volume>/MobileSync/Backup" "/Users/<User>/Library/Application Support/MobileSync"


Where <New Volume> is the name of the volume you want to store the data on, and <User> is the name of your profile. If there are spaces in the path wrap with quotes or escape with backslash. It is probably easier to type in ln -s then drag and drop the two folders onto the command line in turn.


tt2

Backup your iPhone in iTunes straight to External Hard Drive

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