How To Free Up Icloud Storage
If your iCloud storage is full and you want to free up space, there are various options that you may adopt. You should find out which items are occupying more space. You should manage your photo library by deleting the extra pictures. You should delete the email attachments that are no longer needed.
To find out how much storage space you are using, go into Settings on your iPhone or iPad, choose Apples iCloud Storage Service, tap on Storage, and then tap Manage Storage. Instead of having photos stored on iCloud, I recommend using one of the many third-party cloud services, which provide even more free storage space than Apple. By finding an alternate way to store photos, videos, backups, and backup data locally, you will be able to manage iCloud storage more effectively, and you will no longer worry that iClouds storage will become full.
In this tutorial, we show how you can clear out the space on your iCloud for Apple devices, and share a few alternative cloud services to back up your data. You can always purchase more storage, but if you prefer not to, here are a few steps you can take to free up space and decide what exactly to keep in your iCloud storage. While you can purchase more iCloud Space, or switch to one of the best cloud storage solutions as an alternative, a great first step is simply to optimize the existing iCloud Storage by clearing unwanted files.
| Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Delete unnecessary files | Go through your iCloud Drive, Photos, Mail, and other apps, and delete any files or data you no longer need. This will free up space in your iCloud storage. |
| Optimize Photos storage | If you have a lot of photos and videos in iCloud Photos, you can enable the Optimize Storage option. This will keep lower-resolution versions of your media on your device, and full-resolution versions in iCloud. |
| Turn off iCloud Photos | If you don’t use iCloud Photos, turning it off will free up a lot of space. Go to Settings > Photos and turn off iCloud Photos. |
| Disable iCloud backup for certain apps | If you have apps that don’t need to be backed up to iCloud, you can disable their backup. Go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups > (Your Device Name) > Show All Apps. Then, toggle off the apps you don’t want to back up. |
If you are unwilling to disable iCloud and remove all data backups, you can use the solutions below to remove a few unnecessary files at will. Because of snooping, you will need to actively remove unwanted media files from Apple devices if you are using iCloud Photos.
With iCloud Photos enabled, you can directly delete certain photos to clear your iCloud Photos space, unless you wish to disable iCloud Photos entirely. Once you have exceeded the limit on your iCloud storage, your device will instantly delete all videos and photos that you have deleted, and those are not available for retrieval on the Recently Deleted Albums. To help reduce iCloud storage, you can remove photos from iCloud Backup, then download any photos and videos that you have on iCloud to your computer, then delete any photos and videos from your iCloud in order to clear up iCloud storage.
Deleting specific items from your devices, such as older apps or photos and videos, can help to decrease the amount of storage used by your iCloud backups. Similar to Photos and Videos, you can also get rid of iCloud Drive files and folders to free up storage. For those who have more than one mobile device from Apple, another way to recover storage in iCloud is by getting rid of old backups.
You can also click on the backups for devices that are still being used, and turn off specific apps from saving their data in your iCloud account. Toggling this will disable iCloud backups for selected apps, as well as delete any of their information from iCloud. To perform a halt, go into Settings, your Apple ID, iCloud, Manage Storage, Photos, then tap Disable and Delete — but, again, realize this will end your use of your iCloud storage for photos, and photos cannot be restored afterwards.
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You can see how much space you have available in iCloud by going into your Settings app > Your Name at the top > iCloud. Under Choose data to backup, you should now see a list of five apps taking up the most space on iCloud.
Tap Manage Storage to get a page listing every single thing storing data in your iCloud Every single thing storing data in your iCloud (it even tells you how much data every single thing is using there). Under Manage Storage under your iCloud settings, you can click iCloud Drive to view files stored there. Then, click or tap on Manage Backups to see any backups that are currently saved in your iCloud account.
Select the backups that are no longer needed Now, you will see a list of all of the device backups you have made to iCloud. Select Manage On Mac To Delete an iCloud backup Select one of your device backups, and then tap – to delete it.
Before you begin, you should know that deleting your iCloud data will also delete it from the other devices you have enabled for iCloud. Files deleted this way are instantly deleted from iCloud Storage, but backups are retained for a short time just in case you delete something by accident. You can delete files and folders to clear up storage on iCloud using the Files app on your iPhone or iPad.
Deleting large files from your iPhone reduces your iPhones backup size and frees up storage in your iCloud. To get rid of your backups, open up iCloud in either the Settings app (iOS) or System Preferences app (MacOS). It is possible that you set up an older iPhone to download backups automatically to iCloud, then never deleted these files.
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With files from every part of Apples ecosystem flowing to iCloud, it is easy to see how your storage could quickly become full. Five gigabytes of storage is not much space, and you could quickly find yourself running out of space for photos, iCloud Drive files, and other data from your phone or tablet. If you are backing up your iOS devices(s) on iCloud, you are going to run into problems quickly if you are trying to stay below the 5GB storage limit.
Unless you pay an iCloud subscription, Apple gives you 5GB storage space with every device you buy. Apple gives you 5GB of free storage automatically with each iCloud account, which does not sound like a lot at first, but if you play around with it a little bit, you could get by easily on that 5GB free. If you are using an iCloud address for email, emails will be backed up on that 5GB free storage, too.
No matter how many iOS or macOS devices you have, Apple only offers a free 5GB of storage for iCloud users — a paltry amount considering what its competitors are offering. Files stored in Apples file hosting service can go up to 50GB, though at this size, your storage space could be depleted very quickly.
When you discover your iCloud is running low on space, one of the first things you might want to do is to take a look at your iCloud and the data that is stored there. One of the fastest, most straightforward ways to clear out some space is by just unchecking apps you do not want using iCloud (under iCloud > Manage Storage). Simply head into System Preferences (under Apples icon on the top left), choose iCloud, and then tap Optimize Storage.
Why is my iCloud storage full after deleting photos?
It’s likely that you’ve used up the majority of your Android device’s memory if you’re receiving a “Insufficient storage available” notice. To fix this, clear some space on your phone by uninstalling media files, apps, or both. You can also add additional storage, like a Micro SD card.
Can I delete photos from iCloud but not iPhone?
Make careful to first turn off iCloud Photos if you wish to delete images from the cloud but retain those on your iOS devices. Turn “iCloud Photos” off by going to Settings, Apple ID (ones name at the top), iCloud, and Photos. Photos will now remain on your iPhone even after being deleted from iCloud.
Should I delete old iPhone backups on iCloud?
Once you’ve successfully backed it up, you may remove your previous backups from your account to make room for a new iCloud backup. Only if you still wanted to restore any of the information from previous backups to your device would you want to preserve them.