How to Find Old iPhone and iPad Backups Hidden on Your Mac

You connect your iPhone to your Mac, Finder asks if you want to back up locally, you click yes, then forget about it. Two phones and three years later, your Mac has 200GB of backups for devices that don’t exist anymore. The Mac doesn’t surface this — Storage settings doesn’t break out iOS backups separately, and the folder where they live isn’t somewhere most people browse.

iPhone and iPad backups are routinely the single largest hidden category on a Mac that’s been used for syncing iOS devices. Here’s exactly where they are and how to identify which to keep.

Where iOS backups live

The standard location:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Each backup is a folder with a long random-looking name (a UDID hash). Inside each folder are thousands of randomly-named files representing every piece of data on the device at backup time.

To get there in Finder, press Cmd+Shift+G and paste the path. Finder will navigate to it and show all the backup folders.

To list with sizes:

du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/*

That shows each backup folder and how much space it takes. Numbers like 30G, 60G, 100G are normal — phones have a lot of data.

Identifying which backup is which

The folder names are useless to humans. To map folders to actual devices, the cleanest method is Finder’s device interface.

1. Connect your iPhone or iPad (or don’t, if it’s no longer available)
2. In Finder, select the device in the sidebar
3. Click “Manage Backups…” in the right panel

That opens a window listing all backups by device name, model, and date. From here, deleting is one button.

But what if the device is gone? Open Finder without any device connected. Click anywhere in Finder, then choose Finder → Settings → General and ensure “CDs, DVDs, and iOS Devices” is checked in the Sidebar settings. Even with no device connected, you can see “Manage Backups” through Settings menus in newer macOS versions, or via a connected device.

If you can’t easily get to that interface, you can still identify backups by their internal Info.plist. Each backup folder contains an Info.plist with the device name and date. To see them:

for dir in ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/*/; do
  echo "Folder: $dir"
  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print :Device\\ Name" "$dir/Info.plist" 2>/dev/null
  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print :Last\\ Backup\\ Date" "$dir/Info.plist" 2>/dev/null
  echo ""
done

That iterates over every backup folder, prints the device name and last backup date. Now you can see “iPhone 12 Pro - Jane’s iPhone” with last backup 2022-08-14, etc.

What backups contain

Each backup is a complete copy of the iOS device at that moment, minus a few items:

Included:

• App data
• Photos and videos (unless iCloud Photos handles them)
• Settings
• Messages and message attachments
• Notes
• Voice memos
• Health data (encrypted backups only)
• Saved passwords (encrypted backups only)

Not included:

• Apps themselves (redownloaded from App Store)
• iCloud-stored content
• Music/podcasts/movies you didn’t sync directly
• Apple Pay info
• Touch ID/Face ID data

Encrypted backups (the recommended type) include more. Unencrypted backups skip Health and saved passwords.

This is why backup sizes vary so wildly. Someone whose photos are all in iCloud might have a 5GB backup. Someone with 50,000 local photos and 200 third-party apps might have a 200GB backup.

How many do you actually need?

Realistically: one current backup per device you still use. Maybe two — current and one previous-major-iOS-version — if you want a rollback option.

Anything else is dead weight. Backups for:

• Devices you no longer own
• Devices that were stolen or replaced
• Old iOS versions you’d never want to restore to
• Multiple backups of the same device from different dates

These are all candidates for deletion.

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Deleting via Finder (the safe way)

The recommended method:

1. Open Finder
2. Click the device name in the sidebar (or skip this if device is unavailable)
3. Choose Manage Backups
4. Right-click the backup you want to remove
5. Select Delete Backup

This properly removes the backup and updates Finder’s tracking of which backups exist.

If the original device is gone and Manage Backups doesn’t show entries:

1. Plug in any current iOS device
2. Open Manage Backups from that device’s Finder panel
3. The list shows ALL backups for any device, not just the connected one

You can delete backups for devices that no longer exist from this same interface.

Deleting via Terminal (when you can’t use Finder)

If Finder’s interface isn’t cooperating, you can delete backups manually:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/[folder-name]

Replace [folder-name] with the actual folder you want to remove. Get folder names from ls:

ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/

This is permanent — the folder doesn’t go to Trash, it’s deleted directly. Verify the folder name carefully before running.

Encrypted backups and passwords

If your backups are encrypted (recommended for full data preservation), each one has a password set during creation.

If you can’t remember the password to an old backup, you can’t restore it. The data is effectively unreadable. This makes such backups completely useless for restoration purposes.

Two paths:

1. Delete and start fresh. If the device still exists and you can take a new backup, delete the old encrypted one with forgotten password.
2. Keep just in case of password recovery. Sometimes passwords come back to people. But realistically, if you’ve forgotten an iTunes/Finder backup password for a year, you’re not going to remember it.

For encrypted backups you do remember, those are valuable — they include data unencrypted backups don’t. Don’t delete a recent encrypted backup of a current device.

iCloud backup vs. local backup

These are different things and don’t substitute for each other.

iCloud backup is your iCloud-stored backup, taken automatically when your phone is on WiFi and charging. It’s not on your Mac.

Local backup is what we’ve been discussing — stored at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ on your Mac.

Both exist for different reasons:

• iCloud backup is convenient but capped by your iCloud storage tier
• Local backup is unlimited (by your Mac’s disk size) and faster to restore from

Most people end up with both, often without realizing it. Deleting a local backup doesn’t affect the iCloud backup, and vice versa.

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Why this hides from Storage

System Settings → General → Storage in newer macOS versions does break out “iOS Files” — but it’s not always visible, and the breakdown is sometimes lumped into “Other” or “System Data.”

Storage settings depends on macOS knowing what each folder represents. The MobileSync/Backup folder is structurally a bunch of randomly-named files, and macOS’s accounting may classify it as miscellaneous data.

The result: you can have 100GB of backups not obviously visible in Storage’s breakdown. The only reliable way to see them is to navigate to the folder directly.

Moving backups to an external drive

If you want to keep backups but free internal space, you can relocate them. The standard approach is symbolic linking.

1. Copy the entire MobileSync folder to your external drive:

   cp -R ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync /Volumes/[external-name]/MobileSync
   

2. Verify the copy succeeded
3. Delete the original:

   rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
   

4. Create a symlink:

   ln -s /Volumes/[external-name]/MobileSync ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
   

Now Finder’s backups go to the external. Caveat: backups won’t work when the external isn’t connected, and accidentally disconnecting during backup can corrupt data. This is a power-user solution.

A regular cleanup habit

Most people only need to do this once when they realize the problem. After cleaning up old backups, the natural maintenance is checking once a year — when you switch devices, or when you upgrade macOS and review storage.

A cleaning tool can flag the MobileSync folder size as a high-value target alongside other big folders. Combined with renaming the backup folders to match device names (which Finder does in its UI), you can quickly identify which to keep.

The wins here are some of the largest available on a Mac. A single old backup deletion can free 60-100GB. There’s no other category where one decision yields so much space.