EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD HOW TO
EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD PC
EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD MAC

I would keep your external hard drive naming extremely simple. The next step is probably even easier than the previous one, that of moving the backup to the external drive. This “Backup” folder is the backup folder that you are going to move to the external or other hard drive. This will open up the iOS backup which typically is in the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder. Then select Show in Finder from the list of possible items.Then, select the device backup you want to move and either right-click it or click it while holding the Control key.First, launch iTunes and go to your iTunes Preferences.The first step is finding the location of your iOS backup on your Mac. STEP 1 – Find the current backup location Since I’m all about making things EASY, I’m only going to focus on the first option, the ENTIRE backups folder. You can move the entire backup folder which contains backups from all of your iOS devices (this is the easiest but takes up the most space), or you can move individual device backups (a bit trickier but allows you to move just the device backups you want). There are really two ways to approach this.

EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD MAC

Changing the iTunes Backup Location on a Mac

EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD HOW TO

Regardless, let’s see how to change those backup locations on a Mac. The disadvantages of doing a local iTunes backup are 1) the size of the backups and 2) being tied to a single computer for your backups. I’m cheap (just ask my kids) so I do the “free” option of a local iTunes backup. Also, if you have a ton of stuff on your iOS device, you will probably have to pay for additional iCloud storage space. Personally, I recommend doing local iTunes backups (encrypted) as you never know your connection health for iCloud, especially when everybody is upgrading, for example. Lastly, these instructions are for people who do backups using iTunes and NOT iCloud.

EXTERNAL BACKUP FOR IPAD PC

(If you want me to do an article for PC users, please leave a comment!) This article does contain information for changing the iTunes backup location on a Mac only. Now, let’s get into how to move or change the location of your iPhone or iPad backups within iTunes.īe sure to read through all of these instructions before actually doing any of it to be sure you understand what you are doing. I have heard horror stories when people use cheap cables (and those can even damage the circuitry of your iOS device). If you use a cheap knock-off, even if they do say “Apple Certified,” you may have some problems doing a backup. Next a quick tip – when doing local backups, I definitely recommend using a true Apple Lightning Cable. For a 2TB external USB drive, you are looking at about still less than $100 for that peace of mind. A quick search on Amazon for 1TB USB hard drives has quite a number of options for around $50. There are a ton of options available, but I would recommend having at least 1TB just to play it safe. And I’m going to show you how to do this easily.įirst off, I would recommend having a dedicated (or really big) hard drive that you can use for your future iTunes backups. This can be maddening! Luckily, with a little bit of work, you can change that default location for your iTunes backups to an external USB hard drive.

You can get a configuration up to 512GBs! That’s a lot of storage! And who doesn’t like having a ton of space for videos, photos, music, or movies? Well, if you do local iTunes backups (which is what I recommend doing) - you are making regular backups, right? - you may suddenly discover that there is not enough space on your Mac to do backups anymore. New iOS devices are starting to come with a ton of storage.

External backup for ipad