You get an email from Apple saying,
Your iCloud storage is almost fullTo ensure your iCloud services continue without interruption, you can buy more storage or free up space by following the steps below:
What should you do? Buy more space? Not necessarily…
iCloud is a great service that backs up your iDevice but it’s simplicity can also be decieving. It’s very easy to just backup everything on your iPhone and quickly use up the free 5GB that Apple provides. Of course their quick fix is to simply buy more space, which is an easy fix. But before you spend money it’s better to check your settings and manage what gets backed up.
The first thing to do is go to settings, iCloud
Here you can see what is turned on to backup. Not a lot of detail yet until you touch Storage and Backup.
Now we can finally see some numbers. We can see above this example is only using 0.5GB out of the free 5GB available.
Lets get some more info by touching Manage Storage.
Now we can see some fine detail of how much storage each app is using.
The apps are arranged in order by data usage, Camera Roll is using the most at 192MB.
Photo apps are usually the largest users of data, most people turn on iCloud on the device, but not their Mac. This should be your first step, turn on iCloud on your Mac and copy photos to your larger storage desktop or laptop. Also in this example “DramaticB&W” is another photo app that will gradually grow in size as you shoot photos. This can lead to double storage as the app saves images in its own folder, then you export images after processing into your “camera roll”. The same image is saved twice. So we can turn off “DramaticB&W” and save that space.
Email apps can also eat up precious space. Gmail is generous on the web, but you can quickly chew thru 5GB of storage by backing up your emails.
Turn off any apps that are not critical to backup or you have copies of, a good example is iBooks that you have copies of on your desktop. You don’t need iCloud backups of media that is on your desktop. If you were to loose the device you can always reload the media.
If you do end up needing more storage you can easily buy more at a fair yearly price. But maintaing what gets backed up will ensure you don’t waste space and also save battery life and wireless usage.