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Community members who reach Level 5 in the community can create User Tips to share knowledge about Apple products. Check out this User Tip created by Jack-19: Use an external SSD as your startup disk with your iMac or Mac mini
Community members who reach Level 5 in the community can create User Tips to share knowledge about Apple products. Check out this User Tip created by Jack-19: Use an external SSD as your startup disk with your iMac or Mac mini
Is there a way to back up an iPhone 8 Plus directly to an external hard drive on a late 2013 iMac? There isn’t enough room on my computers hard drive and so I am forced to delete a lot of things just to do the backup.
Try an App named iMazing https://imazing.com/ Hope this helps.
If you drive is so full you don't have space for an iPhone backup, it's too full to operate efficiently and error free.
You need to have 15-20% of the drive totally unused at all times for the OS to operate properly.
Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support
You can also back up to iCloud. The first 5GB is at no added cost, and that is plenty of space for an iPhone backup.
Perhaps you may have a USB to Lightning Cable or other suitable wire
to use, that may directly be helpful to transfer images to external HDD.
[These links do not require some third-party software to facilitate use.]
How to Transfer Photos From a Computer to an iPhone - lifewire
https://www.lifewire.com/transfer-photos-from-computer-to-iphone-5072024
Connect external storage devices to iPhone - Apple Support
//support.apple.com/guide/iphone/external-storage-devices-.../16.0/ios/16.0
Transfer files between your iPhone and computer with an external storage device - Apple Support
//support.apple.com/guide/iphone/transfer-files-external-storage-device
I'm able to backup my iPhone to an external drive but it was setup way back under iTunes. With Ventura I haven't found the menu/or button that lets me setup the location.
You[re best bet with an iMac is to move the contents of your Pictures folder to a folder (Pictures-2) on the EHD and operator them from there. You can also move your Music/iTunes library to the EHD (Music-2) to free up a lot of space. Then add those folders to the Finder sidebar so they are easily accessed.
NOTE: the EHD must be formatted either OS X Extendeed (journaled) for HDDs or APFS for SSDs.
FYI for future readers, while iMazing backups can be located on any drive, iMazing requires and uses the ordinary iPhone backup files that are in the default Mac location (~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup), so you don't actually free up any space on your main drive by using iMazing.
It may be possible to create a symlink at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup that points to your external drive so iPhone backups are written to the external drive instead of your internal drive. But I have not yet tried that method. It may or may not work. (For me, using a symlink worked for Mac Mail but not for my Outlook profile, so I have not tried it for iPhone backups.) Note also, in my experience, symlinks have become progressively more difficult to do successfully with each release of macOS since High Sierra.
+1 👍
I also advocate first relocating your Photos, Music & TV folders to an external drive in order to free up space on your internal drive. You have to copy the relevant folders first, then change the Files setting in each app's preferences.
Backing up iPhone directly to external hard drive?
