It is critical to have a backup, so if declining to pay for more and more iCloud storage (a great business for Apple), you’ll need to backup your iPhone to your computer and ensure that the computer itself as a whole is also backed-up, preferably with at least two backups stored away from the computer.
+25
Great article and in general good advice, but, and of course there is always a but, your iPhone backup is not taking as much space as you think.
As an example, looking at my phone right now it says I’m using 171GB of space on the phone. But if I look at my iCloud account, it says backups only account for 26.7 GB of space. And I should note that that iCloud backup space accounts for THREE phones backed up. A quick look at my backup usage on iCloud shows that this phone, which has 171.1 GB stored on it accounts for only 10.1 GB of space on iCloud.
If you’re asking why, remember that iCloud does not backup the applications, only a list of them. In addition, you can select what gets backed up to iCloud. Lastly, if you have certain apps backing up data, like photos, they are not included in an iPhone backup.
And iCloud Photos is important to me so they sync to all devices. So I would not turn that off anyway.
My two space hogs are iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive. I guess time for me to delete some duplicate photos and clean up that iCloud Drive.
I think there are a lot more places to look to recover space than your iPhone backup.
+4
Indeed. Good info. I like the fact that iPhone backups are pretty efficient. Strips away backing up that is easy to restore like the apps and is itself. Thats handy as you then get a clean version of os and apps on restore too
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