Change iTunes backup location

Love it - thanks for tracking this down for Win 10 users 🙂

1.) Do not have a "Backup" in the default C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync location. If you have old backups, put them somewhere else for now.

2.) Do not have a "Backup" in the location you want to link to.

3.) Run mklink command and it will put a shortcut in the C: location, which points to where you want it in the new location

4.) Go to the new location and make an empty "Backup" folder

5.) Go try backup from Itunes (I just did and its working!)

6.) If you want your old backups you can move them to the new folder also

Years on and we still can't choose our back up location?

Same boat I want my back ups to live on a mirrored drive and not waste space on the C:

...with a few phones, ipads etc. that space goes poof pretty **** quick

I know there are some cool work around's but I still want to see apple make this trivial change available in itunes.

Thanks for the information. It was just what I what I needed. I do have one addition, however. On my Windows 10 system, Shift+Right Click offers "Open PowerShell window". In this window, the mklink command is not recognized. One must first type 'cmd.exe' and then enter mklink...

Does iTunes still think there is a backup listed under Edit > Preferences > Devices? If so you may need to delete that entry first. SeeRelocate iOS device backups to check that you've made the junction correctly. See Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows to make sure that suitable permissions exist on the target folder. You may want to see if excluding that folder from any real-time anti-virus scans helps with the issue.

tt2

See Relocate iOS device backups. It is important to move the existing data to the new path, then create the symbolic link such that to iTunes it appears to be on the old path, even though the space used by it is now on a different drive.

tt2

Symbolic links fail in certain cases with the latest 3 iTunes releases, particularly when the target of the link is on a very large volume. I believe there are two independent space checks and one looks at the overall size of the boot volume (C:) and the other checks how much space is left in the iTunes backup location. If the free space is much greater than the total capacity of C:, the backup will fail.

I don't know why Apple can't just add a simple registry key or local config file entry that determines where the backup should be stored (and fail-over to the default location). 14 lines of code, tops, and nothing compared to the bloated whale that iTunes has become. Many of us have the OS on a solid state drive, which is awfully expensive real estate for Apple to blindly assert ownership of with no supported alternative.

I believe there is also an obscure file system bug in Windows (or at least the routines that iTunes uses) that can occur with certain calls to check on free space where only the low order bits of the value are returned. Imagine if the free space was 1,000,001 bytes but the routine requesting the information gets back the value 000,001. The workaround has been to add a few redundant copies of some large file. But yes, in the case of a redirected backup folder the system drive does need enough free space for the backup even though it will end up somewhere else.

tt2

Hi everyone, I've been working on how to change the location of my backups of my iPhone 6 for 4 hours now, and I haven't gotten anywhere. I've successfully created the directory junction to my D:, however every time I try to back it up it says "iTunes could not back up the iPhone “My iPhone” because the backup was corrupt or not compatible with the iPhone. Delete the backup for this iPad, then try again."

I've had a look - there isn't an old back up for the phone or any other devices for that matter. I accidentally deleted my backup instead of saving it onto my hard drive after I created the junction.

Can anyone help? What could the issue be? I use a Microsoft Surface and don't have much space on this to even backup my phone...

Thanks

What does run Mklink command mean? I opened WindowsPowerShell and after typing cmd.exe then I Typed MKlink and it says the Creates a symbolic link but what do I do after that? I changed my old backup to the name Backup_old and created a blank folder where I want it saved but after trying to Backup it created a new Backup folder in the MobileSync location but received the message "iTunes could not back up the iPhone because an error occurred while reading from or writing to the IPhone."

I ran the following command and it said a junction was created:

MkLink /J ""C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "E:\MobileSync\Backup"

Junction created for C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Roaming\Apple <<===>> Computer\MobileSync\Backup E:\MobileSync\Backup

But when I open iTunes it still tries to backup to C:

I tried creating the Junction again by rerunning the MkLink command but it comes back with:

Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

If I look at the MobileSync directory on C:, there is no junction shown. Same when I do a dir command from the command prompt. So the junction does not appear to exist. What am I doing wrong?

leefromaz wrote:

I ran the following command and it said a junction was created:

MkLink /J ""C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "E:\MobileSync\Backup"

Junction created for C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Roaming\Apple <<===>> Computer\MobileSync\Backup E:\MobileSync\Backup

Looks like you have too many double quote characters at the first instance after the /J. It looks like you've created a link called Apple inside C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Roaming that points to [C:\?]Computer\MobileSync\Backup.

tt2

See Relocate iOS device backups for a more recent version of that old advice.

tt2

Thank you. Your cmd.exe works! On Windows10, without cmd.exe step it does not work.

The commands work in Windows 10. You just need to run it from a command prompt as Administrator