- #WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER HOW TO#
- #WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER SERIAL NUMBER#
- #WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER OFFLINE#
If there are multiple backups of the same device, the one with just the UDID for a name is the most current backup. This alphanumer string is, in its entirety, the name of the backup folder within the directory we just pointed you at.
#WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER SERIAL NUMBER#
There you’ll find an entry labeled “Serial Number”, as seen below.Ĭlick on the serial number text and it will change into the UDID: You can check this UDID number (to avoid confusion if you have more than one iOS device), by plugging your device into iTunes and looking at the summary page for the device. This number is an alphanumeric string based on unique traits of your device and looks something like “9324f8cae1ed7af8f566c0ec19f309h92c31f343”. Every time you make a local iTunes backup, iTunes makes a folder that is labeled with your iOS device’s Universal Device Identifcation number (UDID). Each of these sub-folders is a backup–but it isn’t immediately clear which is which, as the folders have rather cryptic names. On both platforms, you will find sub-folders inside the Backup folder. In OS X, the iTunes backup folder is located at: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ In Windows, the iTunes backup folder is located at: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ If you’re using a Mac, however, there is a much easier way, detailed at the end of this article–though it helps to know the hard way so you can navigate your way around. Let’s start with the hard way to access these backups, since it works on both Windows and Mac.
#WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER HOW TO#
Let’s look at where to find the backups and how to interact with them. Unfortunately, especially if you’re using iTunes on Windows, the way iTunes stores backups is a bit on the cryptic side. You can copy them to another desktop in order to use them with iTunes on that machine or you can also copy them to a backup server or external drive to secure them in a secondary backup location.
#WHERE ARE MY ITUNES STORED ON MY COMPUTER OFFLINE#
That can eat up a lot of space on a small drive, so deleting them can free up quite a bit.įurther, if you get a new computer, you may want to transfer the backups to a new computer or create an offline backup. This means If you backup three times, then the sum disk space chewed up is A + B + C, not A + the very minor changes between A, B, and C. Many people don’t realize that iTunes backups are complete backups, not incremental. You might be surprised how many old backups from old devices are lying around on your computer. Old backups of your current device you don’t need, old backups of devices you don’t even use anymore, and so on, can chew up quite a bit of disk space. If you need to purge some old iTunes backups of your iOS devices to free up disk space, transfer the backups to a new computer, or put them in deep storage, you can–as long as you know where to look. The problem is, they take up a lot of space. When you sync your iPhone or iPad with iTunes, it creates a backup on your computer in case you lose your device–or get a new one.