Backing up your iPhone is crucial to ensure that you don’t lose your important data in case of device failure or any other unexpected issue. By default, iOS backs up your iPhone to your local drive, which can be quite large and take up valuable space on your computer. However, you can easily backup your iPhone to an external hard drive to save space on your computer. In this tutorial, we will show you how to backup your iPhone on an external hard drive in just three simple steps.
Step 1: Plug in your external hard drive into your MacBook and create a folder named “backup” with a capital “B” on your external drive. You can place this folder in any other folder of your choice on your external hard drive.
Step 2: Open Finder and go to “Library”. Search for “Application Support” and open it. Look for the “Mobile Sync” folder where macOS saves all backups of your iPhone or iPad. Copy your existing backups into the “backup” folder you just created on your external hard drive and delete the backup folder in “Mobile Sync” on your Mac. If you don’t have any backups, just simply delete the backup folder in “Mobile Sync” on your Mac.
Step 3: Now we will link your backup folder on your external hard drive to the “Mobile Sync” folder on your Mac, so your backup will be saved on your external hard drive and not on your computer. We will be creating a link between a folder stored on your Mac and a folder on an external drive.
Open Terminal app on your Mac and type this command: lowercase “ln -s”, then drag the backup folder that you just created on your external hard drive to the Terminal and it will automatically create a path for it. Next, go back to “Application Support” and drag the whole “Mobile Sync” folder into Terminal and press enter. You just created a link between these two folders. You can confirm that by going to the “Mobile Sync” folder on your Mac and you will see a backup folder with a little arrow. By clicking on it, it will automatically redirect you to your external hard drive where your backup data is stored.
Now you can backup your iOS device, and it will be automatically stored on your external hard drive without taking up space on your Mac. Sometimes, you need to grant full access to the Terminal app to make folder links. To do that, go to Settings -> Security -> Full Disk Access and grant access for the Terminal app.
In conclusion, backing up your iPhone to an external hard drive is a practical and easy way to save up space on your computer. We hope this tutorial was useful to you, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below.