Ditching all cloud services is not easy considering just how convenient so many of them are and how much space some of these services can take. Backing up a phone and tablet, particularly and iPhone and iPad Pro can take as multiple terabytes and often Mac’s have smaller primary storage. (I wonder why Apple…) Fortunately with a USB-C drive and a symlink, you can get basically unlimited storage for backing up devices.
(Obviously update the paths for your set up as needed.)
ln -s "/Volumes/DockedOrbit/PhoneandPadBackups/Backup" ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
Updated and Retried on MacOS 26.0.1 11/05/25