Move iOS Backups to External Drive?

I am switching from a 750GB internal drive to a 256GB SSD on my MacBookPro. I have a 64GB iPad and a 64GB iPhone, both of which are almost full. To back up both devices uses almost 128GB on my internal drive, which will not work for me. The iCloud storage option is very expensive.
I would like to figure out a way to back up to an external drive. I read about a way to do this from MobileMe days, but not sure if it will work now. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this with Lion/iCloud/iOS5?
Thank you.

I recently installed an external Thunderbolt SSD which is now my boot drive, everything from my internal drive was cloned to it. I want to move my iPhone backups back to the internal HDD so they don't eat up space on my external SSD. I tried the code listed here but it's not working. When I entered the code, Terminal said "The file exists", but it's still writing backups to the external drive. Here's the code I used:
ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup
Where am I going wrong?

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