Micah Sargent (0:00)

Coming up on Hands on Tech, let's take a look at backing up your mobile device to your network attached storage. Stay tuned. This is Twit.

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Micah Sargent (2:11)

Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Micah Sargent and today, as we have been doing, we will continue to take a look at the wonderful questions you all have written in. Of course you can email me hottwit TV is how you get in touch with your questions. This week's question comes in from Juan who writes I own a Synology DS 1522 NAS. That's Network Attached Storage. NAS and I had a few questions if you might be able to enlighten me with some answers. First, how can I set up my Synology so when I plug in my iPhone, my iPad, et cetera, into the nas that it can create backups of my devices on the nas? So this is a really good question that makes me think, Juan, maybe, maybe you come from the Android ecosystem. Some Android devices, I should say, many Android devices have a feature that basically says, pretend my iPhone is a hard drive or a flash drive, whatever you want to say that it is, it's a storage location. And when I plug it into my computer, then I can, you know, simply drag and drop files to it or from it as if it was just a little plugged in hard drive. The iPhone does not have that feature. And so if you take your iPhone and you plug it into your nas, your synology, it's not going to be able to look at the file system on the iPhone and automatically pull things from there and back it up to your network attached storage. It's just not a feature of the iPhone. The iPhone requires either a Mac or a PC. We just talked about it using Apple devices on the PC. In our last episode, we talked about this on the Mac, using the finder to back up locally to a location. And so because of that, you can't just plug it in and have that back up. You can, however, again use the Mac or the Windows machine in between to do those backups and then have them be stored on your network attached storage. So there's one thing that I want to suggest before I talk about the solutions that are available to you that involve using kind of the built in backup functionality of your phone, your iPhone, and that thing is the Synology Drive mobile app. So the Synology Drive mobile app is an app for your phone that you install and you give it permission to access different files and photos and other content on your phone and then back that stuff up to your network attached storage, your Synology NAS specifically. So this is the best way to kind of do things from the Synology side with your and your wife's phone or iPad or whatever device it happens to be, to not only see the content that's on your network attached storage, but also to back up your content on your phone to your Synology disk station. So that is the way to do it from the Synology side of things, if you want to do it from the iPhone side of things with iOS and iPados kind of running the show. The easiest way to do this if you're not super versed in some of the more complicated aspects of using macOS in particular, which I will talk about in a minute. Then I recommend an app called imazing. I've talked a lot about imazing on this show and on other shows. It is a tool that I use regularly because it does one. I mean, it does many things, but the one thing that it does that is very important is it lets you choose where you want your local iPhone and iPad backups to be stored. So with imazing, I can say backup my iPhone regularly when I plug it in and put it in X location. So for you, you would say I want my icloud or my, excuse me, my iPhone backup and my iPad backup to be on my network attached storage. And then when you plug in your phone to imazing, it handles the rest. It goes ahead and does that. But what's even better is that imazing understands the iOS and iPados, those operating systems, and so it has access to the wireless syncing functionality that is included with icloud and local device backups. What I mean by that is you talk about plugging in your iPhone, your iPad, et cetera, to do that. And for the initial backup, I absolutely recommend that with imazing, go ahead and plug in your phone to your Mac and then set the location to iPhone backup or whatever you want it to be on your network attached storage and do it wired the first time. But after that you can enable in imazing a schedule every day over my local network, my local wi fi network, back up my phone and it will do that without you needing to plug it in. So your device is going to stay backed up even if you're trying to avoid icloud, which it maybe sounds like you're trying to do. Or maybe you want icloud backup as well as this as a backup, in which case then it can service that as well. So that's the way to do it. With imazing. There is a way without needing to install imazing, to tell macOS to store your local iPhone iPad backups on your network attached storage. But it does use the terminal and involves some symbolic linking. And occasionally that means you can run into issues because of different networking problems that you might have or what have you, if that's something that you want to do. I'm not going to go into detail about that option here, but you can look up change iPhone backup location and you'll. You'll find plenty of walkthroughs on how to go about that. Also, if you just email me and ask me that that's what you want to do. I can give you more information on how to do that and kind of go through the process. But essential, essentially the place where these local backups will be stored. You replace that directory with a symbolic link to a location on your network attached storage. And so macOS puts it in that spot, but that spot is actually linked to a spot on your network attached storage. So it just automatically gets dragged and dropped over to your network attached storage. Sort of. The pedants among us will have issues with that. But that's basically it's putting it in. It's making the system almost believe that it's supposed to go here, when actually it goes here. And so it can do what it knows it's supposed to do, but then the files can go where you actually want them to go instead. So I really recommend imazing for the simplicity, but also because it means that you don't need to be plugged in to do that syncing after the first time. And then Imazing has a bunch of other functionality as well. That makes it pretty doggone cool for being able to pull stuff off of your phone, your iPad, out of apps, even. So that's my recommendation there.