How to back up iPhone directly to external drive

Hello sbn_uw,

While you can use an external storage device on your iPhone, it won't back all your content like iCloud or your Mac can.

You can really just back up Photos and files located in the File App.

See this article:

-> Connect external storage devices to iPhone - Apple Support

To be honest, your best bet is to either free up storage on your Mac or use an external drive for it and move files you don't need/use often to free up space so you can backup to your computer.

These articles might be useful:

-> Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

-> How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

There’s a difference between syncing to iCloud and backing up to iCloud. It’s important to understand this difference.

iCloud+ has 2 independent functions. iCloud backups, and iCloud sync. It’s confusing because they both have the same name prefix. But they have no connection with each other. Go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud. You will see a bunch of switches. When you turn on a switch that data type will sync to iCloud. If you do this on multiple devices that share an Apple ID the selected data will sync to all of those devices. 

You can also turn on iCloud Backups. This will back up your phone every night if the phone is plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and locked.

But note that anything that you sync by the first method will be excluded from the iCloud backups.

That is correct. That would have made a complete backup of your device. (=