Catalina OS: disable automatic backup iPhone, Apple Devices terminal command

If you annoyed of having to have your iPhone backed up every time you load the new Music app by Apple and sync your Apple device, please read.

As you may or may not know, iTunes is gone, that’s right, gone. More info. iTunes is dead and is being replaced with four separate apps: Music, Books, TV and Podcasts.

On previous versions, it was as simple as entering a one-line command in terminal: defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

As this would work on iTunes, this won’t work in the Apple Music app. Here is how you can disable automatic backup on Catalina (no iTunes) on the Music app.

 

disable step 1 backup on sync apple

Find the backup folder

Quit the music app if it’s running.

Using Finder, from the file menu select: Go > Go to Folder…

Catalina disable automatic backup go to folder

Type the following path into the box and hit ‘go‘.

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/

(Replace YOURUSERNAME with your Mac username)

GOTO PATH

 

Set permissions

Look for the folder called ‘Backup‘.

 

Catalina disable automatic backup go to folder

 

Right-click and select ‘Get Info‘. The information dialogue should appear on your screen.

 

Catalina disable automatic backup permissions

 

At the bottom of the info dialogue window, click the user’s privilege on the second column where it says ‘Read & Write and select ‘Read only‘. This should now replace the privilege for the main user from ‘Read & Write‘ to ‘Read only‘.

 

backup folder permission to read only

 

This should now disable automatic backup iPhone or any other Apple devices that run a backup on every sync.

 

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