Move iOS Backups to External Drive?

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Level 1

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Move iOS Backups to External Drive?

I am switching from a 750GB internal drive to a 256GB SSD on my MacBookPro. I have a 64GB iPad and a 64GB iPhone, both of which are almost full. To back up both devices uses almost 128GB on my internal drive, which will not work for me. The iCloud storage option is very expensive.

I would like to figure out a way to back up to an external drive. I read about a way to do this from MobileMe days, but not sure if it will work now. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this with Lion/iCloud/iOS5?

Thank you.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2), MBPx2, MP, LionServer, RAID, iPad2

Posted on Feb 2, 2012 1:40 PM

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Answer 1

wjosten

Level 10

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Feb 2, 2012 1:51 PM in response to tigerlibra23

http://aaltonen.us/2011/01/03/change-the-location-of-your-iphone-backup/

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Answer 2

tigerlibra23 Author

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Feb 2, 2012 2:15 PM in response to wjosten

Thank you, I saw something similar to this, but wondered if anything had changed since iCloud?

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Answer 3

wjosten

Level 10

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Feb 2, 2012 2:19 PM in response to tigerlibra23

You're welcome.

Those directions are for someone who backs up their iOS devices through iTunes. If you decide to backup through iCloud, you can delete the iOS backups on your computer. You do one or the other, not both at the same time.

Of course, if you use iCloud, it's most likely going to cost you money, as you will exceed the free storage limit.

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Answer 4

espring

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Jan 30, 2013 7:19 PM in response to tigerlibra23

I recently installed an external Thunderbolt SSD which is now my boot drive, everything from my internal drive was cloned to it. I want to move my iPhone backups back to the internal HDD so they don't eat up space on my external SSD. I tried the code listed here but it's not working. When I entered the code, Terminal said "The file exists", but it's still writing backups to the external drive. Here's the code I used:

ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup

Where am I going wrong?

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