How to Backup iPhone to Flash Drive

The longer you use the iPhone, the more iOS content pile up on your iPhone. This makes the iPhone work slowly, and can’t spare more free space to store favorite photos, videos, and run interesting games and apps. At this moment, you may need to free up the iPhone space.

To free up space on iPhone, you may backup your iPhone to the computer but if so you may lose the backups because of hardware failure, computer crashes or other reasons. Furthermore, backup iPhone via iTunes or iCloud could be a good choice, and then delete the data to free up space. However, backing up iPhone via iTunes or iCloud means you never can get access to backups you made unless you plan to restore your iDevice.

So now choosing a flash drive to backup iPhone is a good way to solve this problem. But as we all know, there is no direct way to transfer data from iPhone to flash drive other than the help of some third-party software. Here in this post, we will introduce two methods for you to backup iPhone to a flash drive.

How to Backup iPhone to Flash Drive with iTunes

iTunes is the most common tool for Apple users to backup their devices. Although there is no way to back up the iPhone directly to a flash drive, we can still make it by moving iTunes backup files. Now, follow the steps below to see how to backup iPhone to the USB drive.

Step 1. Locate your iTunes backup files on your computer.

If you are using a Mac:

Find a list of your backups:

• Click the Search icon in the menu bar.
• Type or copy and paste this: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
• Press Return.

Locate a specific backup:

• Open iTunes. Click iTunes in the menu bar, then choose Preferences.
• Click Devices.
• Control-click the backup that you want, then choose Show in Finder.

If you are using a Windows PC:

To find a list of your backups, go to \Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

Step 2. Once you have found your iTunes backup files, copy and paste the files you want to your flash drive.

How to Backup iPhone to Flash Drive with AnyTrans

Although you could find the iTunes backup files and transfer to your flash drive, there is one crucial issue that might bother you, which is you don’t know what content do those backup files have. Both iTunes and iCloud will not give users access to the backup files. In other words, you will never know what has been backed up until you restore this backup to your iPhone.

To solve this issue, you might need third-party software to help. Here we recommend AnyTrans, one professional iDevice (iPhone/iPad/iPod) data transfer tool that can always put your important data in the right place. Some features of AnyTrans are listed below:

• It can help you backup iPhone to flash drive/USB easily, including music, photos, videos, messages, notes, contacts, etc.
• It allows you to preview all data on iPhone in detail and choose the data you want to backup before transferring data from iPhone to flash drive.
• It also enables you to view the details of your iCloud backup files and exporting data from iCloud backup to flash drive directly.
• Supports all iPhone models and computer systems. Such as iPhone XS (Max)/XR/X/8/7/6s/6/5s/5c/SE/5 and Windows XP/7/8/10, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac.

Download and install AnyTrans on your computer (Mac or Windows), then follow the steps to backup data of iPhone to flash drive.

Step 1. Open AnyTrans and connect with your iPhone. Click on Content to PC on the main interface.

Step 2. Choose the files you want to backup and then select the USB as the target save location. Click Next to start transferring.

Wait until the transferring process is finished, the time it spends depends on the size of your content. All the data you back up to the flash drive will be stored in one file, you can check and view the content any time you like.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, compare to the traditional method, backing up iPhone to flash drive with AnyTrans provides you with more flexibility and convenience. Besides backup iPhone to flash drive, with AnyTrans you can also easily export your data from iCloud backup to flash drive. For this guide, if you have any questions or suggestions, please be free to contact us by email (support@imobie.com).