Back Up Your Files With A Cloud Storage Service
To save space, you may also decide to store your files in a cloud account rather than on your iPhone. If you choose this option, the obvious choice for an iPhone user is iCloud, which comes with 5GB of free storage space. Here are some other popular cloud storage services you can get for free:
- Dropbox: Basic account comes with 2GB of free space.
- : Free account comes with 15GB of free space, shared with your other Google accounts.
- OneDrive: Basic plan comes with 5GB of free storage.
Delete Unused App Data
Other third-party apps that you download from the App Store can also use iCloud to help sync your data across all of your devices. So, if you have an app you dont use much anymore, you might want to remove that from your iCloud account to save space.
First Find Out Whats Taking Up So Much Space
When it comes to cleaning out your iCloud storage, you first need to see what youre storing thats taking up so much space. If youre using your iPhone or iPad, heres what you need to do:
If youre on Mac, do the following:
It doesnt matter which way you do it youll see how much storage you have left and what type of files are taking up the most space. Most of the time, the categories taking the most space will be Backups, Docs, and Photos, which are pretty self-explanatory.
Theres also an Others category. Similar to the Other Storage on iPhone, this is a group of other files and data that arent big enough to have their own category. It will vary for everyone, but most of the time, it stores things like Mail and Messages.
Now that you know whats taking up the most space, you can start by tackling that category first, but you dont have to stop there. You can free up storage from every category. Heres how:
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Clean Up Icloud Drive
iCloud Drive is where Apple stores copies of all of your other types of files, like documents, PDFs, and application files. Over time, your Drive storage space can fill up with clutter just like your messages, mail, and photo libraries.
Cleaning out iCloud Drive is easiest from a computer, although it can also be done on an iPhone or iPad. On a Mac, simply head to the iCloud Drive folder in Finder. Then you can sort files by size, type, or creation date and delete anything you no longer need.
iPhones Are Known For Their Cameras But What Happens When You Run Out Of Space For Those Photos
The holidays are creeping closer and this year, its going to be different. Thanks to vaccines, including boosters and newly available shots for kids ages 5 to 11, more people are able to gather with their extended families in person.
That likely means more photos and videos. Lots of them. Unfortunately those big beautiful files can quickly eat up all of your smartphone storage. As with Thanksgiving pie, its best to plan ahead so you dont run out of room. To make sure theres space for every candid of grandma playing with the adorable pandemic babies, do a little memory maintenance ahead of time.
Weve already covered the , so if youre an Android user or an Apple person who relies on Google Photos you can learn more there. If youre on an iPhone or iPad, start with these basics to avoid a full phone or iCloud account.
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How To Set Up Find My iPhone
Find My iPhone lets you remotely track your lost, stolen, or misplaced Apple device be it an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, AirPods, or Mac from virtually anywhere, as long as the device in question has some kind of internet connection. Not only can Find My iPhone help you locate a stolen or lost device, but it can also assist in remotely wiping your private information so your device data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. If you’re not sure where to start, we can walk you through enabling Find My iPhone on all your devices.
Figure Out Icloud Backup Size
As I mentioned earlier, iCloud doesn’t back up every last thing on your phone. Instead, it takes a smart approach, and won’t back up things that are synced with your internet accounts or that you’ve purchased with your iTunes Apple ID. To figure out exactly how much iCloud space your backup file will take, go to Settings, tap on your Apple ID and then go to iCloud > Manage Storage> Backups. There’s a list of devices that are backing up or trying to back up with your account.
Give your phone a few moments to figure things out, then look at the top of the screen. You should see the following details: Last Backup, Backup Size and Next Backup Size. If you haven’t backed up your iPhone to iCloud before or in a long time, the Next Backup Size will be a pretty large amount of data. Obviously, if it’s more than 5GB you must either buy more storage or adjust what you’re backing up.
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How To Delete Photos From Icloud Photos
If your , deleting photos from your iPhone is a great way to clear iCloud storage, and the Photos app makes it to delete multiple pictures at once. If you unintentionally delete something, you can also find and get them back. Here’s how to delete photos from iCloud, as well as how to retrieve deleted photos.
If you don’t use iCloud Photos, the pictures and videos in the Photos app still take up storage space as part of your iCloud backup. You can see how much storage they’re using:
Delete Attachments In Messages
Texting isnt just about text, right? Youre sending and receiving memes, GIFs, selfies, little videos of your cat falling off the couch in her sleep. All that content is stored on your iPhone even if you dont save it to Photos, and if you text a lot it quickly adds up.
Heres how to delete all your attachments in Messages to clear some iPhone memory:
Thats it! Space-hogging attachments are gone.
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We’ll Show You How To Make The Most Of Your Current Icloud Plan
Apple gives every iCloud user 5GB of storage, which sounds like a lot until you consider that its per account, not per device. Thats not much space to share between a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, and its even worse if you share your account with family members too. No matter how many devices you have, hitting the storage limit is a matter of when, not if so what do you do when it happens?
Apple would very much like you to buy more storage, and thats always an option: we subscribe to one of the bigger storage plans because 5GB just isnt enough for us. But before you move from 5GB to a paid-for plan, or from a paid-for plan to a more expensive one, its worth seeing if you can reduce the amount of storage space you need. That doesnt just free up space and potentially save you money. It can spring-clean your Mac or iOS devices too, making the stuff you care about much easier to find.
How To Delete Files From Icloud
Let’s get into how to clear up iCloud storage by deleting files and folders on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. *Note* Participating in someone else’s shared iCloud folder does not count against your iCloud storage limit. Also, if you make a mistake and delete files and folders from iCloud that you didn’t intend to, you can find them in Recently Deleted for 30 days. Here’s how to free up iCloud storage by deleting iCloud files and folders.
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Reduce The Size Of Photo Library
In case you dont want to use iCloud Photo Library, note that your photos stored in Camera Roll are part of your iCloud backup. You can check the size of backup on your iPhone or iPad:
In your iOS 11: Settings Your Name iCloud and then Manage Storage.
In iOS 10.3: Open Settings Your Name iCloud iCloud Storage Manage Storage.
In iOS 10.2 or earlier: Launch Settings iCloud Storage Manage Storage.
To minimize the size of Photo Library backup, you can save your photos and videos to computer or take a back-up of your iPhone or iPad. You can turn off Photo Library in backup if you have decided to keep your photos and videos on the device itself buying more iCloud storage is another option for you.
If your camera roll is packed with photos that need to be discarded, simply delete those photos.
Manage iCloud Storage in iCloud Drive on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or Windows Computer
With the release of iOS 11, Apple introduced Files app inside the iOS devices and iCloud. If you have stored your files like documents and photos in iCloud Drive, you can easily delete to create some storage space on iCloud.
How To Quickly Reduce Icloud Storage In Two Simple Steps
With every Apple ID, you get 5GB free iCloud storage. If you are reading this post, chances are your iCloud storage is full, and now you are looking to free up space. Let me show you two quick solutions that will help you manage and reduce iCloud storage on your iPhone, and some additional tips to keep it that way. Once you follow these, the annoying failed backup notification or buy more iCloud storage banner will go away.
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Delete Photos From Icloud Storage
By default, iCloud backs up all your photos and videos to the cloud. Over time, that adds up to a lot of pictures. You can save space by deleting any images you no longer want. It’s possible to do this from your iPhone, iPad, or the iCloud website. As long as Google Photos is enabled, any pictures you delete in one location are automatically deleted everywhere. Here’s how to delete photos from iCloud.
Streamline Your Email Storage
Your email can store a considerable amount of data on your iPhone, both in cached emails and attachments, so its worth exploring options to reduce the space your email takes up.
The easiest way to save space is to consolidate your emails. If you have a Gmail account, its possible that youre using both Apples Mail app and the Gmail app for one account. If this is the case, you can delete one app and use only the other one, potentially halving the amount of storage used!
Another way to cut down on your email data is by removing and then re-adding your email. This can help you to free up storage by clearing this data from your iPhone .
Caution: Dont remove your email account from your iPhone if you use POP
Email accounts that use POP3 are downloaded directly to your iPhone and won’t stay on the server. POP is no longer very commonly used, but deleting the account from their phone would be disastrous, as emails arent stored in backups.
You should only delete your email from your iPhone if you use Gmail or another web-based service that uses IMAP. The easiest way to test this is to log in to your webmail from a computer, or via Safari on your iPhone: if the emails are still available over the web, then they clearly havent been downloaded to your phone and removed from the web.
Once youve verified that you connect to your email account using IMAP, rather than POP, you can continue to delete your email account, safe in the knowledge that your data will be protected.
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Delete Photos Or Videos From Recently Deleted Folder On Mac And Windows Computer
Step #1: Open www.icloud.com and log in with your Apple ID and password.
Step #2: From the launchpad, click on Photos folder.
Step #3: By default, you will be seeing All Photos under the Albums you need to click on the Recently Deleted folder.
You can either click on Delete All from the upper right corner of your computer screen or select the photos you want to delete. Simply click on each photo and it will be selected.
You can also choose the option to recover photos this is residing next to Delete All.
Make Your Photo Library Smaller
If youre like us you probably dont delete all your not-quite-good-enough photos. Its amazing how much storage space you can free up when you get shot of them, and deleting unwanted pics is a good habit to get into. Its particularly important with video, which takes up a lot of space.
Its worth remembering that deleted photos and videos arent actually deleted: theyre moved to the Recently Deleted album, where they still take up space. To free up that space go into the album, make sure theres nothing you need to keep and select and delete the lot.
If youre really struggling for space you can turn off iCloud Photos altogether. That can make an enormous difference our library is currently 177GB and youve got 30 days to download everything from iCloud before they disappear for good.
If you dont use iCloud photos, your Camera Roll is backed up automatically. You can turn that off by following the steps for disabling per-app backups in Step 1.
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Delete Mails To Free Up Icloud Storage
If you are using iCloud mail account to communicate, you must have compiled some data that needs to be cleared. Note that emails with attachments occupy more space than normal text emails.
When you remove emails from your iCloud email account, a lot of iCloud storage space gets freed up. You can also transfer your email messages from your iOS devices to your Mac or Windows PC, where your email data is not counted as iCloud storage.
On iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
You can delete email messages from any mailbox if you have set up your iOS devices to access iCloud email then you can delete the emails from trash to free up space.
Step #1: Open Mail app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
Step #2: Now tap on Inbox .
Step #3: Long swipe right to left on any email message to delete it.
Step #4: Go back to Mailboxes and tap on Trash foler.
Step #5: Again long swipe from right to left on the deleted mail to completely remove it from the Mail app.
You can delete multiple email messages by tapping on Edit button while you are at the inbox. Select the messages and tap on Trash from the bottom right corner.
In Trash folder, tap on Edit and select the emails you have deleted from Inbox finally, tap on Delete button from the bottom right corner. Your emails will be quickly deleted.
By Step Guide: Manage Icloud Storage Plan From Mac And iPhone
Method 1: Buy more storage on Mac. Go to Apple menu and System Preferences, select iCloud, tap on Manage at the bottom, then click Buy More Storage and select the available plan.
Method 2: Change Storage Plan on iPhone. Open Settings app and go to your Apple ID > iCloud > Manage Storage, then tap on Change Storage Plan at lower position and choose a plan.
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Clear App Cache And Other App Data
Unlike browsers, most apps dont give you access to their cache and other data they store, such as login data. And if you tap on each app at the top of that list in iPhone Storage, youll notice it has several gigabytes of so-called Documents and Data. Heres how you clear that app data to get more iPhone storage:
Yup, unfortunately, this is the only way to clear cache and other app data for the majority of apps.
Don’t Back Up So Much
iClouds automatic backups can take up a lot of space. There are two kinds of backups: system backups and individual app backups.
Lets look at system backups first. On a Mac, go into System Preferences > iCloud and then click on the little Manage icon in the bottom right corner. Now select Backups. Here youll see a list of device backups, and you can delete any that you dont want or need.
You can do the same in iOS by going into Settings > your user name > iCloud and going into the Storage bit. The specifics vary from version to version, so for example in iOS 11 its Manage Storage > Backups and in iOS 10 its iCloud Storage > Manage Storage. You can now select the device and delete its backup. You can also stop that device from backing up altogether.
Now lets consider individual apps. The process is largely the same as for backups, but its iOS-only. Go into your iCloud settings and storage and youll see a big list of Apps Using iCloud. You can turn their iCloud off with the buttons: green means on and grey is off.
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