Old iPhone backups on your Mac: find them, see which is which, delete the ones you don't need

30 September 2026

It is new-iPhone month, which means a lot of people are about to plug an old phone into a Mac, back it up, and restore the new one from it. Your Mac will keep that backup. It also kept the one from the phone before that, and the iPad you sold, and the "archived" copy you made before an iOS beta. It never deletes any of them on its own, and it doesn't warn you they are there. On a Mac that has seen a few phones, this is often the biggest single folder in your Library.

How big each one is

A Finder backup skips anything already stored in iCloud (Apple lists iCloud Photos, iMessages and texts among the things it leaves out), plus App Store content and anything synced from the Mac. What is left is your app data, settings, and photos if iCloud Photos is off. So a phone that keeps its photos in iCloud might make a 10 GB backup; a 256 GB phone that doesn't can make one over 100 GB.

The easy way: Storage settings

System Settings → General → Storage, scroll to iOS Files and click the ⓘ. Every backup is listed with the device name, the date it was made and its size. Select the ones you don't need and click Delete. No phone needs to be connected.

If you prefer Finder: connect the device, select it in the sidebar, and under General click Manage Backups. That only works for a device you still have.

The Terminal way, with names

The backups live in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, one folder per device, named by a long device ID that tells you nothing. Each has an Info.plist that says which device it is. Terminal needs Full Disk Access to read this folder (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access). Then:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup
for d in */; do
  echo "$(du -sh "$d" | cut -f1)  $(plutil -extract 'Device Name' raw "$d/Info.plist" 2>/dev/null)  $(plutil -extract 'Last Backup Date' raw "$d/Info.plist" 2>/dev/null)  $d"
done

That prints size, device name, last backup date and folder for each. A folder whose name ends in a date and time, like …-20250914-203311, is an archived backup. Finder keeps those forever, separate from the regular one, and they are usually the first to go.

Which ones to keep

• Keep the latest backup of the phone you use, at least until your new phone is set up and you have checked that photos, messages, WhatsApp and your authenticator app all came across.
• Keep one encrypted backup if you don't use iCloud backup. Apple only includes Health, Activity and saved passwords in encrypted backups. If "Encrypt local backup" is on, that backup may be your only copy of them.
• Delete backups of devices you sold, gave away or lost, and archived copies you no longer need.

Setting up a new iPhone without filling the Mac

You may not need a Mac backup at all. Quick Start, the screen that appears when you hold the old phone near the new one, copies everything directly between them. If you would rather go through iCloud, Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone → Prepare for New iPhone on the old phone gives you temporary iCloud storage for the move, free, even if your plan is too small. Either way the Mac stays out of it.

The iOS update files next door

When Finder updates or restores an iPhone or iPad, it downloads the whole iOS image first and keeps it:

ls -lh ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone\ Software\ Updates ~/Library/iTunes/iPad\ Software\ Updates 2>/dev/null

Each .ipsw is several GB. They are safe to delete once the update is done; Finder downloads a fresh one if it ever needs it.

Moving backups to an external drive

Finder has no setting for where backups go. The common workaround is to move the Backup folder to an external drive and leave a symbolic link in its place. It works, but Apple doesn't support it, and if the drive isn't plugged in when you back up, the backup fails. If you only back up before switching phones, deleting old backups is simpler.

In ddeploy

Old iPhone backups is one of the Clean Up cards. It lists every backup with its size and is marked Look First, so nothing is ticked until you choose. Whatever you pick goes to the Trash, not straight to deletion, so you can put it back. The same scan finds the rest of what fills a Mac: local snapshots, caches, installers in Downloads, WhatsApp media chat by chat. Scanning is free, and so is your first clean.

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