How To Manage iPhone and iPad Backups In macOS Catalina

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can manage iPhone backups on your Mac and delete old ones you don't need anymore. 

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So if you've had several iPhones over the years and maybe iPads too and you've backed them up to your Mac they could be taking up space on your drive that you could free up by deleting those. Let me show you how.

The first thing you need to do is connect your iPhone or iPad with a cable to your Mac. Now you can do it over WiFi but you have to set it up that way first. Once you have it connected you if you open a window in the Finder then you should see it appear on the left under Locations. Now it's very easy to not see it. For instance, notice if I move my cursor over the Locations there's the Hide button there. I  can click that and a lot of people have something that looks like that right, so they don't see Locations. You have to move your cursor over and click Show and then you see all the different drives and network drives and things. You'll see your phone listed there. 

Another reason it may be missing is if you go to Finder, Preferences and then Sidebar and here is CDs, DVDs, and iOS Devices. That's your iPhone and iPad. So make sure that is checked. Click it and you'll enter the mode in the Finder that looks a lot like iTunes used to look when you would connect your iPhone or iPad. If you have General selected you'll have various general settings here. Now here's where there's a checkbox for Show this iPhone when on Wi-Fi. So if you have the checked, and you have to connect by a cable in order to check it the first time, then you don't actually have to connect your device with cable. It should show up in the sidebar regardless.

So now you'll see a button here for Manage Backups. If you click that you'll get a list of backups on the Mac. Backups for this device and for others. Unfortunately there's no way to get this list unless you connect your device. So if don't have your iPhone or iPad with you there's no way to get to this list. I'll show you how to access the backups manually if that's the case. But here now you can go and look at your backups.

So if you've got one on here for a device that you don't have anymore or maybe it's an old device that's in a drawer that you don't need to backup you can click it like that and you could click Delete Backup and it will delete it. Unfortunately you don't see how big the backup is but you can Control click or two finger click on a trackpad on the device and choose Show in Finder. This will bring up a Finder window looking deep inside your Library folder with the folder selected that represents that backup. So with that still selected your could do File, Get Info, or 

Command i, bring up information on it and you can see here the size of everything in that folder. So that's the size of the backup and how much space its on your drive.

But if you can avoid it don't actually delete it here. Just use that to get the size. Instead select it right here, hit Delete Backup and that's the way to get rid of that old backup. I should point out also if you see you've got an old backup there but it is in a device that you currently have then you can use this Back Up Now button to update it. Sure you may have a backup in iCloud but why not have two backups especially if you do have the extra space on your Mac's hard drive. 

What happens if you have no iOS device handy and you know you've got some backups taking up space or at least you want to check to see. Well you can get to that location in the Library folder. Choosing the Go menu and holding the Option key down and Library will appear only when you have the Option key held down. Then you can go to Library. Then go to Application Support. Then from there scroll down and you'll find MobileSync and then you'll see Backup.There are those three folders and each one of them contains a backup. So if you see nothing there or you can't find this folder at all then you have no local backups of any iOS devices. But if you see folders here you know you've got them.

You can use Command i to get info and see the size of this. Also you can check the Modified date here and see when this backup was made. Now the one thing it doesn't tell you is what device this is, right. You've got this cryptic name here. So if you look through the list here at the very bottom you're going to see info.plist. Open that up in TextEdit. You can Control click on it and choose Open With and then Other. Select TextEdit from the list of you can drag and drop it onto TextEdit if you happen to have that in your Dock. If you search for Device you'll come up with this little section here that says Device Name and underneath it iPhone 6. So in this case that's the name of the device. So it could have been called Gary's iPhone 6 for instance. Now you know the name of the device and you know the size. You can make a judgement call as to whether or not you want to select this folder and move the entire thing to the Trash to get rid of it. 

You should note that if you chose to encrypt your backup it's a little harder to figure out what it is. So if you go to the info.plist here and you open it up in TextEdit it's going to be encrypted. So you really can't be certain what device this backup is although the backup date in the info window should give you a clue.

Also keep in mind if you have multiple user accounts on your Mac each user account could have its own set of backups. So if you and your spouse both have user accounts there be sure to check both user accounts and see which backups you have there that you maybe able to delete and get back that space.