It is widely recommended and makes a lot of sense to back up your smartphone or tablet more often than not. The easiest but also most expensive way is what a large proportion of Apple device users do: take out a large, paid iCloud subscription and back up everything there.
This is very convenient, but that’s about it. Extract individual data? No chance. Protect data from unauthorized access? Difficult to verify. In addition, backups via mobile networks cost data. There has always been an alternative: making backups locally using iTunes, in this case on Windows. But this also has its pitfalls: everything is backed up to the boot drive C:\ by default and cannot be configured.
Very inconvenient. Imagine an almost full 256 GB iPhone being backed up to a 512 GB system SSD. Neither of these are unrealistic sizes. First, the SSD will fill up very quickly, and second, write operations are exactly what you should avoid with SSDs.
This is particularly inconvenient when backing up multiple Apple devices. The amount of data quickly gets out of hand.
What to do?
There is a fairly simple solution, which would not be necessary if you could configure the destination path in iTunes. Of course, you need a location where the backups can be created instead. An internal or external hard drive would be conceivable, but a Samba network share would be recommended. In our case, we use a Synology NAS for backup purposes.
You can hide the real location for iTunes at the file system level by creating a symbolic link. This has to be done via the command line, but it’s very easy.
First, iTunes must be closed. Then navigate to
%appdata%\Apple Computer\MobileSyncand, if necessary, copy the existing “Backup” subfolder to the new, desired destination. The folder must then be deleted from its old location. If there is no such folder, no local backup of an Apple device has been created yet.
The “MobileSync” folder should now be empty. Now open a command line with the Windows key + R or via the Start menu with the command “cmd” and create a symbolic link with this line:
mklink /D "%appdata%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "\\DS918\iTunes\Backup"The destination “\DS918\iTunes\Backup” must of course exist. If everything worked, you can close the command line and should now see a folder called “Backup” again under “%appdata%\Apple Computer\MobileSync” but with the usual “shortcut icon” next to it. Double-clicking on it should now take you to the destination folder, which could be anywhere.
Success.
When you create backups with iTunes, they will now always be saved in the desired path. In our case, the folder already takes up a whopping 1.2 TB of storage space, which would be more than impractical on a boot drive (two iPhones, some older backups, and three iPads).
The disadvantage is that you have to perform this procedure on every computer on which you want to use iTunes. However, the symlink has always survived in-place upgrades of Windows so far.