Yesterday, I was attempting to update the firmware on my iPhone and iPad but was running into an error, specifically:<\/p>\n
“iTunes could not back up the iPhone “Boyd’s iPhone” because the backup could not be saved on the computer.”<\/em><\/p>\n This was due to the C: in my computer reaching its capacity. Using a 128GB solid state drive meant I had to come to a decision about how to carve it up for the operating system and applications. I wanted to give enough space for applications so I split the drive roughly as follows:<\/p>\n The C: was always going to be a bit of a squeeze and I usually ran within about 2 or 3GB of maximum capacity. Things have been running fine for ages until yesterday. iTunes seemed to consume quite a bit of space in “C:\\Users\\<Username>\\AppData\\Roaming\\Apple Computer\\MobileSync” during the upgrade process and, in doing so, used up every last megabyte of space on the operating system partition.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, I had a 1TB hard drive as a data partition (E:) with some 830GB free. I thought to myself that surely there was a way I could move my iPhone and iPad backup to the E: as well as the temporary scratch pad used by iTunes during its upgrade.<\/p>\n I was right.<\/p>\n Without getting too technical, the default file system on modern Windows computers (which is NTFS<\/a> – or New Technology File System) allows for something known as a “symbolic link”. A crude summary of this functionality is that you can repoint a folder (or file) that seems to exist in one location to another one in a completely different location.<\/p>\n So how did I do it?<\/p>\n Despite Windows 7 including a command line tool “mklink”, I used something called “Junction” created by Windows Sysinternals in 2007 and available here<\/a>. It’s fairly straightforward to use too. Before I used it though, I renamed my existing backup folder @ “C:\\Users\\<Username>\\AppData\\Roaming\\Apple Computer\\MobileSync\\Backup” by putting a “1” on the end and copied its contents across to a folder on the data partition.<\/p>\n\n