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

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

Locate a specific backup:

1. Open iTunes. Click iTunes in the menu bar, then choose Preferences.
2. Click Devices.
3. 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. 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 them 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. To solve this issue, you might need third-party software – AnyTrans.

AnyTrans is a professional iDevice (iPhone/iPad/iPod) data transfer tool that can always put your important data in the right place. With this tool, you can make a complete backup of your phone or selectively back up some of the data. Some features of AnyTrans are listed below:

Now you can follow the steps to back up iPhone data to the flash drive.

Step 1. Download and 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 the iPhone to a flash drive with AnyTrans provides you with more flexibility and convenience. Besides backup the iPhone to a flash drive, with AnyTrans you can also easily export your data from iCloud backup to a flash drive. For this guide, if you have any questions or suggestions, please be free to contact us by email (support@imobie.com).