Some of you users of iPhone and iPad might not know that syncing your apple devices actually causes a full back up to be performed. That would mean that your boot drive will be overwhelm with the iOS backups if you happen to have multiple apple devices.
For myself, I have an iphone4 and ipad2 so upon checking, iTunes is actually storing about 22GB of data on my SSD! (too many videos on iPad I guess) iTunes does not provide any option in the preference page for changing the location of the archive folder.
The backups are stored in c:\users\(username)\appdata\roaming\apple computer\mobilesync\backup so you can check how much storage your iOS backup is taking up on your boot disk now.
Fortunately, there is a work around for this problem on Windows VIsta and Window 7
1) close iTunes
2) move the existing c:\users\(username)\appdata\roaming\apple computer\mobilesync\backup folder to the new location that you wish to keep the folder (for example D:\backup)
3) open a command prompt and create an NTFS junction point using a command similar to the one below, replacing D:\backup with the path to your destination:
mklink /J “C:\c:\users\(username)\appdata\roaming\apple computer\mobilesync\backup” “D:\backup”
You have just save some precious space on your SSD boot drive!
Care to share?
References: <a href=”Oliver Aaltonen’s Blog
[…] Windows – Changing IPhone and iPad backup location […]
Hi. I don’t have the move option in Windows 7. So I cut the “mobile sync” folder and pasted it in my backup drive. However when I go to the command prompt I receive the error “The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect”
I suspect it is because I have cut and pasted the “mobile sync” folder from C:\ to D:\ ???
Cheers