How to Find Your Current Backup on MacOS
Because of the complexity, we’ve broken down what needs to be done before moving your iPhone backup to an external hard drive into multiple steps. First, you need to know where the backup is stored on your Mac. It’s not hard to find.
How to Move iPhone Backup to an External Hard Drive
Now you’ve found your backup, you need to move it to your external hard drive. This step is pretty simple.
Can You Change Where Your Mac Saves iPhone Backups?
If you want, you can permanently change where the Mac saves your iPhone backups. The process involves being comfortable changing a few background settings on your Mac via the Terminal command. If you’ve never dealt with Terminal before, it can be intimidating as it’s powerful and not exactly user-friendly. Changing Mac’s location for iPhone backups is the trickiest part of this process. To always have your iPhone back up to an external hard drive, you need to create a symlink so that your Mac knows where to look for future backups. It’s not hard to change the location if you follow these steps, but it does require some concentration. You also need to change some permissions on your Mac first to get to the result.
Update Permissions on Your Mac
Here’s how to change those permissions.
Change iPhone Backup Locations
Now you’ve completed that step, here’s how to change iPhone backup location on Mac.
How Do I Know the New iPhone Backup Worked?
When dealing with backups, you want to be certain that you’ve done it all correctly. Here’s how to double check.
How to Disable Automatic Backups
The downside to having a backup on your external hard drive is if you don’t always have the external hard drive plugged in, you can have issues. Here’s how to disable automatic backups so you only back up your iPhone when you want to do it.
