iPhone Backup is Not in Regular Location: How can I find it?

Hello there mjjgm,

I understand you're looking for assistance with locating your iPhone backup with iTunes on your Mac, so let's see how we can help with that.

It does sound like you have attempted the steps to locate this, but have found that nothing is listed at this point. For clarification, when you searched the location with spotlight search feature, did you hit enter after typing the location in, or did you wait to see if anything generated? If you haven't hit enter after pasting that location, give it a try to see if it pulls anything up.

In addition to searching that location, have you checked your device backups to see if a backup has been completed with iTunes? For help with checking that, use these steps: In iTunes, choose Preferences, then click Devices. From here, you can right-click on the backup that you want, then choose Show in Finder to see where it is located. For additional information on this, check out the section labeled "Search for the backup folder on your Mac" of the following resource and be sure to follow the steps referencing iTunes as you don't use Finder for backing up your iPhone.

Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

If you still can't locate this information, it would be best to Contact Apple Support to look into this in detail with you.

Have a great day!

~ is your user's home folder, typically the same as your username on the computer.

Library is a hidden folder within ~. Press cmd + shift + period (.) on a Mac to show or hide hidden files and folders.

Apple don't provide a way to select the path used for backups. If you need this data to live on a different volume in future 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 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