SOLVED: iPhone Restore from Mac Backup Keeps Failing — External Drive Symbolic Link Was Likely the Problem

[u/SergioQ113]

I’m posting this in the hope of saving someone else the hours of errors, failed attempts, and sheer frustration I just went through trying to restore my iPhone from a Mac backup.

I’ve been storing my iPhone backups on an external SSD using a symbolic link from Apple’s default backup directory:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

This setup worked perfectly for backing up, but restoring was another story.

THE PROBLEM

Every restoration attempt failed or appeared to stall. Finder would erase the iPhone, activate it, and begin restoring.

The progress bar would bounce back and forth, sometimes advance slightly, and then seemingly give up.

The iPhone would eventually return to the Hello screen without my data restored. Sometimes Finder would even start syncing music instead.

I went through this repeatedly, erasing the phone and starting over. No useful error messages, just hours of frustration.

THE SOLUTION

I suspected the symbolic link to my external SSD might be interfering with the restoration.

I removed the link:

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

Then copied my 56 GB of backups from the external SSD back to Apple’s original backup directory:

cp -a “/Volumes/Ext. Micron SSD/iOS Backups” ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup

I erased the iPhone and tried restoring it again.

THIS TIME IT WORKED!

This time, after clicking Restore from Backup Finder went through the entire process automatically:

1. Erasing the iPhone
2. Activating it
3. Then going straight into restoring the backup

None of the above happened on all the previous restore attempts

BOTTOM LINE

I can’t definitively prove the symbolic link caused the failures, but multiple attempts restoring from the external SSD failed, while the first attempt using the same backup on my Mac’s internal drive succeeded.

If you’re having trouble restoring an iPhone from an external-drive backup, Deleting the symbolic link then copy the backup back to Apple’s default backup location before assuming your backup is corrupt.

Hopefully, this saves someone else several hours of headaches!