Why Is My iPhone Backup Size Too Large

A C.A. by profession and a tech enthusiast by passion, Gaurav loves tinkering with new tech and gadgets. He used to build WordPress websites but gave it all up to develop little iOS games instead. Finally, he dropped out of CA to pursue his love for tech. He has over 5 years of experience as a writer covering Android, iOS, and Windows platforms and writes how-to guides, comparisons, listicles, and explainers for B2B and B2C apps and services. He currently divides his time between Guiding Tech (writer) and Tech Wiser (editor).

Paurush dabbles around iOS and Mac while his close encounters are with Android and Windows. Before becoming a writer, he produced videos for brands like Mr. Phone and Digit. On weekends, he is a full-time cinephile trying to reduce his never-ending watchlist, often making it longer.

How to Check iCloud Storage and Backup

Apple iPhone takes a backup of the phone and stores it on iCloud, the company’s proprietary cloud service that uses Google servers. Every iPhone user gets5GB free iCloud space, which is used for backups, storing files, and so on.

OpenSettings > (Your Name) > iCloud> Manage Account Storage.

Here you will see a visual breakdown of your iPhone storage. You can change your storage plan. You will also see Backups option and a more granular list of apps that iCloud takes a backup of and their respective size. Tap on theChange Storage Planoption to check prices in your native currency.

Tap onBackups > Tap on your iPhone nameto see the last backup details.

You will notice that iCloud is taking a backup of all sorts of data from different apps like contacts, calendars, images, videos, documents, your carrier app, and so on. Do you need to take a backup of everything that sits on your iPhone? Probably not.

What Items Should Be Part of Your iPhone Backup

You can disable the apps that you don’t want to backup by tapping the toggle next to their name. Now, check if your iPhone backup still too large.

Tip:Learn how todelete WhatsApp backup from iCloud storage.

Backup Media Files Separately

Videos and images are two items that can take up themaximum amount of storageon any device. We suggest you to use anapp like Google Photos, which is platform agnostic and will back up all photos and videos, albeit at a slightly lower resolution. It’s not that bad. You canalways upgrade your Google Driveplan to take backup of those files in full resolution. There are other cloud-based services available to store media files too. That should help to reduce iCloud backup size vastly.

Another example could be iMessage attachments. Long threads or large attachments could be responsible. You to check whether those big files are not beefing up the iCloud backup size.

iCloud vs. iCloud Photos

There are two ways to take a backup of your photos to iCloud, and at any given time, only one is used by Apple. We saw how you could take a backup of your photos to iCloud using the traditional backup option. That will back up everything along with what resides in the Photos app.

Another option isiCloud Photos. This is a sync service that will take a backup of all photos the moment youconnect to a Wi-Fi service. You can access and recover these photos anytime you want. However, when you are using the backup service,photos are backed up once every 24 hours. You will have to restore your iPhone completely to recover photos from the Backups setting.

Tap onSettings > Photos > Enable iCloud Photos.

There are some other useful settings here that are pretty self-explanatory. We recommend iCloud Photos as it will not only reduce your iPhone backup size considerably butalso enable sync and some additional options. Note that sync will allow you to access these photos and videos on all connected devices, which is an added benefit.

Should You Include Documents in iPhone Backup

Documents such as PDF files, spreadsheets, and presentations can take up a lot of space too. They are certainly important and should be enabled in Backups. However, you don’t need to back them if you are using Google Drive or Office 365. The former allows unlimited storage for such files even in the free plan.

The latter will require a subscription and should be used over Apple’s office productivity apps, if you already have one.

Delete Old Backup and Try Again

Apple’s ecosystem is pretty closed so there aren’t many troubleshooting options available, except this one. Go back to theBackupssection underManage Account Storageas shown above and select your device. You can see how many backups are there here.

Tap on youriPhone backup >Scroll down and then chooseTurn Off and Delete From iCloud.

That should delete all the particular backup. Reboot your phone once and let it take a fresh backup. Check how much space it takes and whether it is too large for your iCloud account.

You can take a manual backup underSettings > Your Name > iPhone > iCloud Backup>Back Up Now.

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Last updated on 20 August, 2024

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