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How many GBs does your iPhone backup take on your MacBook Pro and how to reduce it?
- Thread starter Hieveryone
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Wow, what a tremendously helpful post for this thread!0. I use Android and they backup to the Goggle cloud.
To OP, my 256GB iPhone 7 Plus's backup takes about almost 12GB on my Mac.
You can keep the backup files on an external to save space on the internal. Just connect the external when you want make a backup.
Basically you create a backup folder on the external. Then have a symlink in the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync folder pointing to the backup folder on the external.
Here is one link explaining although I think that makes it seem much more complicated than it is.
Sorry, should have specified. There is about 130GB of data on the phone. Lots of music and photos, primarily.
My understanding is that iTunes backups only backup what it absolutely needs to. if you have a lots music, apps and films purchased from iTunes it will simply put lists of these in the backup, since when you do a restore it can re-download them. So I assume if you have a lot of your own material it will back it up. So the space used in a backup will vary according to source of the content.
Correct... and that is why I mentioned earlier to the OP an iCloud Backup will suffice.
Agreed. iCloud backup is fine and avoids the problems of using local storage, but of course will anyone over the free iCloud allowance. My reply was really throwing light on why local backups might vary a lot in size, depending on content.
iCloud backups contain health and activity data automatically. iTunes backups don't include these unless the backup is encrypted.
Do you also have backups from your other iOS devices listed in your sig?
I have also found that sometimes multiple backups are saved for a device instead of only the most recent backup. I called Apple and they said I could delete older backups, if desired, in order to not waste the disk space. You can check the status of iOS devices backups and delete them by launching iTunes and checking Preferences...>Devices.
Normally each time you back up your iPhone it is an incremental backup of the previous one, but there are sometimes good reasons why you might want to "archive" a backup, done by right clicking the backup in iTunes prefs. This means that back up is preserved (has a date next to it), and that the next backup is a whole new one instead of incremental.
If you have more than one backup on the same device it may be an archived one, which if you don't need any more you can delete in iTunes.
Because the backups are incremental, the size will grow as you do more, so you could delete the existing backup and do a fresh one.
Your backup may be large because you have a lot of your own material on it as my previous reply in #9.