HT4946 Is there a way to change where itunes stores its iphone backups?

Question

My primary drive is a small 120gb SSD, and backing up my 64gb 4s is really not an option. I have plenty of storage on other drives on this computer (windows 8) but itunes doesn't seem to give me an option to save my backups to a specific location.
Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

Relocate iOS device backups
Assuming you're running Windows Vista or later you can use the following steps:
Using Windows Explorer move the current Mobile Sync Backup folder from C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup to your chosen location, e.g. as  X:\Backup where <User> is your Windows user name and X: is your preferred drive.
To make iTunes look for the data in the new location open a command prompt by hitting the start button and typing CMD<Enter> in the search box that opens up, then type in this command and press <Enter>
MkLink /J "C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "X:\Backup"
If your external drive has a different letter or you already have a folder called "Backup" then edit "X:\Backup" accordingly.
Anyone still running Windows XP can use Junction (cmd line tool) or NTFSLink (shell ext). In either case move the existing folder to a new location, create an empty folder where the old one used to be, then use one of the tools to get the operating system to link the two together and silently redirect any file operation on the old location through to the new one in a similar fashion to MkLink.
Note that while this method works for iOS device backups it cannot be used to redirect sections of the media library. iTunes will break the connection the first time it tries to write a file to the target folder.
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