Multiple iphone backups taking up 1TB of HD space

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nini2428 Author

Level 1

8 points

Multiple iphone backups taking up 1TB of HD space

macOS Sierra 10.12.6

3.5gHz Intel Core i7

32GB 1600MHz DDR3

iPhone iOS 11.2.6

iTunes 12.7.3

Ive noticed that the largest files on my Mac are my iPhone backups. Is this normal? Id like to keep my most recent backup as well as at least one older backup. I do this because I don't truly understand the syncing of photos and I'm paranoid about losing old files that I have deleted off of my iPhone to save space. I have Photos on my iPhone set to backup to iCloud, Photos on my Mac are not set to backup to iCloud. I also backup my iPhone via iTunes to an external HD. iTunes and all of its files reside on my Mac while Photos and its files are all offloaded onto the external drive.

Is this all wrong? Should my iTunes backups be this large if Photos are stored on an external drive? My photo and video files are absolutely huge so the idea is to keep that data off of any system I use (iPhone and Mac) and have duplicate backups of all photos.

Thank you in advance.

Posted on Feb 26, 2018 1:32 PM

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Answer 1

sberman

Level 10

263,655 points

Feb 26, 2018 2:19 PM in response to nini2428

Something is philosophically wrong with your approach. Let's see if I can explain this in an understandable way.

Basically, your starting assumption is that your iPhone is the primary place where your photos live. Instead, I strongly suggest making your Mac the primary place where your photos live.

Photos contained in an iPhone backup are essentially those contained in the iPhone's Camera Roll. Once photos leave Camera Roll, they are assumed to be primarily housed somewhere else.

Your Mac shows a 3TB Macintosh HD drive. Why not house your photos there (consider this their primary home), and then use Time Machine, which you already have as part of MacOS, to keep your backups?

How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support

That way, you can clear plenty of storage on your iPhone (which will improve its performance), and clear many of these huge iPhone backups.

Further, consider the following:

nini2428 wrote:

I have Photos on my iPhone set to backup to iCloud, Photos on my Mac are not set to backup to iCloud.

You cannot back up only photos from an iOS device to iCloud. You might set up iOS backups to iCloud (but in your case, you back up to iTunes). But in any case, you cannot steer part (but not all) content to a specific place. You may use iCloud Photo Library, but that is not a backup method.

And when you say "Photos on my Mac are not set up to back[ ]up to iCloud", that is correct, as there is no way to do this even if you wanted to.

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Multiple iphone backups taking up 1TB of HD space

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