How To Change The Backup Location Of Itunes (or Any Windows App)

By Author: Brooke M. Perry
Total Articles: 84
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As a computing device user, in some way or other, you must be dealing with storage issues irrespective of the size of your drives, and consequently you will certainly run short of storage. While every bit of storage space in your device counts, the most precious is the space in your primary SSD drive. Solid State Drives (SSD) are known for their speedy performance but not for their expansive storage capabilities. In short your precious SSD space fills up early especially because it accommodates the backups and data directories of Windows Applications or iTunes. There is actually no sense of utilizing your primary drive space to accommodate backup files of applications that you don’t access frequently.

There are ways through which you can change the backup locations of iTunes and other Windows app so that your primary drive space remains free for accommodating other important system files and also keeps your system performance up.

Listed below are the ways through which you can change the backup location of iTunes and other windows apps from the primary drive to any other large size drive (secondary drive), which ...
... is not an operating system (OS) drive.

Move the Backup Directory via Symbolic Links

You can perform this operation using the symbolic links system, which is an effective and very advanced shortcut that remains transparent to the application under consideration. All you need to do is to move your iTunes or other applications backup directory to the secondary disk and then automatically your iTunes data will end up getting stored on the secondary disk.

1. Create a new backup directory: First and foremost, create a new backup directory. As mentioned above, the operation is to move your iTune or Windows App data to a secondary drive, say G:\ drive, so you will have to create the backup directory on G:\ drive. You can name the directory as per your convenience say “iTunes Backup.”

2. Locate and rename the current backup directory: The next step is to locate the current iTunes for Windows App backup directory. After locating it you require renaming it. For locating the current backup file perform the following steps:

Press the ‘Start’ button
In the shortcut box paste: “%APPDATA%\Apple Computer\MobileSync”

This will navigate you to the current backup folder used by iTunes. Open the folder and it will have many other folders inside. Look for the one named “Backup.” Now rename that folder as “Backup-Old.”

3. Open a command prompt: Next you need to open a command prompt, for this perform the following steps:

Move to the (/MobileSync/) directory
Press hold the ‘SHIFT’ key and right-click inside the explorer pane of the current folder
Select “Open command window here”
This will open a command prompt
This command prompt will already focus on the current directory
Create the symbolic link: Now you are ready to create the symbolic link. In the command prompt launched in the last step, enter the following command:

mklink /J “%APPDATA%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup” “G:\iTunes Backup”

Here, “mklink” command stands for the Windows shell command for creating a symbolic link and

“/J” switch is meant for creating the symbolic link known as a Directory Junction.

Through this new created symbolic link, any application querying about the original “Backup” directory will be directed to the “iTunes Back” directory that you created in the secondary drive.

Now, inside the \Mobile Sync\ folder, you will see two folders, one labeled “Backup” with a shortcut icon and another labeled “Backup-old.” This “Backup” folder with the short icon is the symbolic link. If you click on the “Backup” folder, it will open normally and will not switch over to the secondary drive. But anything placed in this folder will get physically stored in the “iTunes Backup” folder in secondary drive, here G:\. Hence, your entire backup files with get stored in the “iTunes Backup” folder in the secondary drive instead of the “Backup” folder in the primary drive.

4. Initiate an iTunes backup: Now it’s time to check whether the symbolic link is working. For this just go the secondary drive and open the “iTunes Backup” folder, here you will be able to see your collection of backup files that got created after the creation of symbolic link.

5. Copy the original backup data: To import the earlier backup files from the primary drive to secondary drive. Go to the “Backup-Old” directory that you created earlier, it resides inside the \Mobile Sync\ folder of your primary drive. Simply copy the files in the “Backup-old” folder and paste it on “iTunes Backup” folder of the secondary derive. Unlike a regular same disk-to-same disk transfer, this transfer from one drive to other will take some time.

Using the aforementioned tips you can easily move backup directory or any bulky data from your small primary disk to a larger secondary disk. As you have read above, doing this is very simple as you just need to locate the data directory and adjust the commands to get your data transformed to the new drive.

You must be wondering what the benefit of changing the backup location of iTunes is? On completing, you will see that after removing iTunes and Windows applications backup files from the primary disk, you could successfully free around 5GB of data on our primary disk. Hence, it can be concluded that 5 minutes process deliver great rewards by resolving your drive storage issue considerably.

About the Author: He is a Technology writer working with Qresolve as a Technical Support Engineer. Brook M. Perry has been offering online tech support to global customers for issues related to laptops, desktops, Mac and devices including iPods, tablets, iPhones. online pc support She caters to the segment of core technology and provides viable solutions to any issues related to technology and software. Her expertise and skills in handling key technology issues is immaculate and quick result bearing.