"Can I back up my iPhone to an external drive?"
The answer to the question depends on the tool you opt to use. The official ways to back up an iPhone include iCloud and iTunes. iCloud stores your iPhone backup in cloud storage while iTunes has its default iPhone backup location on your PC or Mac. Thus, when you want to back up an iPhone to an external hard drive, iCloud won't help.
Then how about iTunes? Actually, you can't change the default iPhone backup location on your computer and you are not suggested to do so. Why? Changing the backup location or moving iPhone backups to an external drive has the potential to corrupt the backup files. Besides, when you need to restore an iPhone from the backup, you have to move the backups back to the original folder. Overall, neither iCloud nor iTunes is the proper tool for you to back up an iPhone to an external hard drive.
Luckily, there are third-party tools that enable you to back up an iPhone to an external hard disk without worrying about file corruption. Among them, here I'd like to recommend Qiling MobiMover for you.
To back up an iPhone freely to a PC, Mac, laptop, or an external drive connected, you can try the iPhone transfer software - Qiling MobiMover. It is a combination of various iPhone-related tools and can serve as an iPhone data transfer tool, an iPhone backup tool, a WhatsApp manager, and a HEIC converter. When you are looking to make a backup of your iOS device, you will be able to:
Thus, you can certainly back up an iPhone to an external drive with it. All you need to do is change the backup location from a folder on your computer to a folder on the external disk.
To back up an iPhone to an external hard drive:
Step 1. Connect your iPhone to your PC with a USB cable and go to "Backup Manager" > "Back up" in Qiling MobiMover.
Step 2. Check the content you need to backup and tap "Select" to change the iPhone backup location to the external hard drive. Then click "One-Click Backup".
Step 3. Wait for the backup to complete. If you need to restore an iPhone from the backup in the future, go to "Backup Manager" > "Restore" to restore the backup from the external hard drive to your device.
Making a backup of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is just one of the many things Qiling MobiMover can do for you. To manage your iPhone content better, you can use it to:
Photos, videos, music, ringtones, contacts, messages, books, and more are all transferrable. If you have a frequent need to transfer data to or from an iDevice, using Qiling MobiMover or one of its equivalents is advisable.
It's needless to stress the importance of backing up your iPhone regularly. If you are not willing to back up the whole device since it will take you much time, you can choose to back up your iPhone files selectively. For example, photos are precious and you can back up iPhone photos only. With the backup, you will be able to avoid complete data loss and don't need to worry about losing your important data anymore.