SyncShot

Before you start.

The hard part of iPhone backup isn't the copy — Apple makes the phone visible to the Mac. The hard part is making sure the copy lives somewhere outside Photos.app and iCloud, in a form you can hand to a different computer five years from now.

SyncShot installed
Latest build on the Mac doing the backup. Launched and ready.
A drive with real headroom
The iPhone is bigger than people remember — modern phones can hold a terabyte. Pick a drive sized for years of phones, not one phone today.
The iPhone and its cable
Lightning or USB-C, whichever the phone uses. A short cable is fine — this is a wired job by design.
A folder convention
Decide where the phone copy lives on the drive — top-level Photos, year-based, phone-named, whatever ages well for you. Pick one, use it every time.

Step by step.

  1. 01

    Connect the iPhone to the Mac

    Cable in. If macOS asks the phone to trust the computer, tap Trust on the phone and enter the passcode. SyncShot picks up the iPhone as a source the moment macOS does — no Photos.app required.

  2. 02

    Open SyncShot and select the iPhone

    The phone shows up in the source list with the model name. Choose it. The file tree on the right shows every photo and video the iPhone is willing to hand over.

  3. 03

    Add the external drive as a destination

    Plug the drive into the Mac and let macOS mount it. In SyncShot, add it as a destination — the whole drive, or a folder on it named for the phone or the year.

  4. 04

    Choose a folder layout that ages well

    Group by date, by year, or by phone. The point is consistency — when you do this again in six months, the new copy should land somewhere predictable next to the old one.

  5. 05

    Decide what to bring across

    All photos and video, or a date range — both are valid. A first-time backup wants everything; an ongoing one wants what's new since last time. SyncShot handles either.

  6. 06

    Start the job

    SyncShot reads the phone once and writes to the drive. JPEG, HEIC, RAW, video, Live Photos, screen recordings — everything moves under the same job with progress you can watch.

  7. 07

    Verify and unmount the drive

    Wait for green across the report. Every file hash-checked against what the phone handed over. Once verified, eject the drive from Finder and the backup is safe — independent of iCloud, independent of any single Apple ID.

After it's done.

One verified copy is the floor, not the goal. The real backup story is two copies in two places. Once the drive backup verifies, the same SyncShot job can fan out to a second drive, a NAS, a cloud bucket — the iPhone read once, the bytes everywhere.

Open the job report
Every file, every verification mark, every byte accounted for. The drive copy is real when the report says it is.
Add a second destination
Re-open the workflow and add another destination — a second drive, a NAS, an off-site cloud bucket. Run the job again; the iPhone reads once, the bytes land in both new places.
Save the workflow for next time
Three months from now, the same phone will have more on it. Save the source and destinations as a workflow — next backup is one click, same drive, same verification.

For the iPhone source detail, see iPhone offloading. Need to verify the result? Verifying with BLAKE3. More step-by-step at the user guide hub.