How to Back Up iPhone to External Hard Drive via iTunes?

Hi there,
I want to be able to backup my iPhone 4 to an external harddrive since I don’t have enough space on my MacBook Pro hard drive, how do I dothat? I have already moved all the iTunes libraries and media folder to that externaldrive and need to know how to default the IPhone4 backup to the external drive.I am using iTunes 10.

You can do the following to get the setup you need.
Copy the contents of ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/ to  the external driveThe ~ means your home drive
Then rename the folder Backup in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/ to say BackupOld
mv ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/BackupOld
Create a new linked folder to the external drive (I assume the external drive is called ExtDrive
First create a folder called iTunesBackup on the external drive
mkdir /Volumes/ExtDrive/iTunesBackup
Now create a link between where iTunes thinks the backups are and the external drive
ln -s ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup /Volumes/ExtDrive/Backup
Job done....

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