How to change your iTunes iPhone/iPad backup location to a different drive

Works with Windows 7 / Windows 8

1) Ensure that iTunes in closed. Close it if it’s still open.

2) Download Junction (link). This just makes symbolic links for you.

3) Unzip Junction.exe to your login account’s folder. This is found in C:\Documents and Settings\Users\<USERNAME>

4) Create a folder in your new location (eg: H:\iDeviceBackups)

5) Move your old backup files from the iTunes backup folder into your new folder. The default location for the iTunes backup files C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backups. The backup files will be in folders with long names like “b1ff22223sddads0dssd333d145dsdsdbds2213d3sdsds6c”. Move these long named folders into your new folder on the new drive (our example above was H:\iDeviceBackups. So you should now have a folder structure that looks like this H:\iDeviceBackups\b1ff22223sddads0dssd333d145dsdsdbds2213d3sdsds6c\)

6) Open the command prompt (hit the windows key and type cmd then hit enter). Type the following replacing the <USERNAME> with your values and make sure you also change H:\iDeviceBackups to your backup location.

junction “C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup” “H:\iDeviceBackups

6) Close the Command Prompt and open iTunes and backup.

 

If you are getting errors when trying to run junction it’s probably because you’ve used the 64bit app.

“‘junction’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.”

If you see something like this then use junction64 … instead of junction ….

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