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All iPads iPad Backup via iTunes Windows PC related questions

H

hajime

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jul 23, 2007
7,922
1,311
Hi, few weeks ago I connected my iPad Pro M1 2021 to a Windows 10 PC and backed it up via iTunes. Now that the internal drive of my PC is getting full, I would like to remove the backup data.

Q1: Under my user folder>AppData>Local, there are Apple, Apple Computer, Apple Inc. Are the latter two folders containing all the backup data? Will I mess up iTunes if I deleted these two folders by just dragging them to the trash? I want to save space for my Windows PC.

Q2: If from now on I want to backup my iPad to an external drive via iTunes on my PC, is it better to delete the above two mentioned folders, uninstall iTunes and reinstall it before doing the backup?

Thanks
 
Shirasaki

Shirasaki

macrumors P6
May 16, 2015
16,263
11,764
There are symbolic link tricks online where you can move those backup folders to a different one so everything can go to external hard drive. It’s different from iTunes library and you cannot change the location of those backups in iTunes.

As for which folder contains backup, check folder size. The biggest one usually is the one containing backups, unless your backup is insanely small (less than 50MB total).

Don’t delete iTunes. You need to move the backup folder outside of your Windows PC internal drive and reinstalling iTunes won’t help.
 
D

Digitalguy

macrumors 601
Apr 15, 2019
4,643
4,469
hajime said:
Hi, few weeks ago I connected my iPad Pro M1 2021 to a Windows 10 PC and backed it up via iTunes. Now that the internal drive of my PC is getting full, I would like to remove the backup data.

Q1: Under my user folder>AppData>Local, there are Apple, Apple Computer, Apple Inc. Are the latter two folders containing all the backup data? Will I mess up iTunes if I deleted these two folders by just dragging them to the trash? I want to save space for my Windows PC.

Q2: If from now on I want to backup my iPad to an external drive via iTunes on my PC, is it better to delete the above two mentioned folders, uninstall iTunes and reinstall it before doing the backup?

Thanks
Click to expand...
There is no way of backing up via iTunes on an external drive... And yes if you delete the backups you'll lose them...
Unfortunately iTunes only backs up to the C: drive
 
Shirasaki

Shirasaki

macrumors P6
May 16, 2015
16,263
11,764
Digitalguy said:
There is no way of backing up via iTunes on an external drive... And yes if you delete the backups you'll lose them...
Unfortunately iTunes only backs up to the C: drive
Click to expand...
Symbolic links can trick iTunes to backup to an external drive. That’s what I did back then and it worked very well.
 
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