Backup your iPhone in iTunes straight to External Hard Drive

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sotonkona Author

Level 1

8 points

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

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Answer 1

Best reply

turingtest2

Level 10

272,937 points

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

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Answer 2

sotonkona Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 2, 2019 3:28 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks very much for this, going to try it this evening. Sounds like it's the redirection of the MobileSync and organisation of the library on my hard drive that might fix it.

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