How to clear space in your iCloud storage
— -- Question: My iPhone keeps nagging me that its iCloud backups are full, and that I should delete some backups or pay for extra storage. What should I do?
Answer: Apple's iCloud service — part of the welcome changes in iOS 5 that ended the need to plug an iPhone or iPad into a Mac or Windows computer for setup, backup and updates — includes five gigabytes of online backup for free, plus unlimited backup of purchased movies, TV show, music, apps and books.
That can seem like a lot, next to the compact size of most files on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch — for instance, photos, ringtones and the data and settings created by individual applications. But everything adds up. And you may not realize this has been happening until you start getting warnings from Apple that you're about to max out your quota and are invited to spend $20 a year for an extra 10 GB
To see what's taken the biggest bite of your free 5 GB allotment, open the Settings app and select iCloud, then Storage & Backup, then Manage Storage. The app will list them in order of decreasing size.
On an iPhone that had been displaying this nag, the leading offender was Camera Roll — all the photos and videos taken with the phone — at about 5 GB by itself. Starbucks' iPhone app was in second place, having somehow piled up 5 megabytes and change of data and settings. Only a handful of other apps, including Evernote, Skype and Twitter, had piled up more than a megabyte of info.
The obvious answer in that case — and in most, I'll guess — is to exclude Camera Roll from the automatic backup. You can (and should) still backup photos to a Mac or PC with iTunes, but you don't need to do that as often as you might think. Why? Because a different iCloud service will also store your photos online automatically.
That would be Photo Stream, which saves copies of photos taken on iOS devices or added to your Mac or Windows PC (if the latter is running Apple's iCloud control-panel software) in an online album for 30 days. It also downloads full-resolution copies of those images to your computers and keeps lower-resolution copies of the 1,000 most recent images on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Apple TV.
And Photo Stream doesn't count against your iCloud backup quota either.
There are just two wrinkles to watch out for: One is that Photo Stream, as its name hints, doesn't include videos you record on an iOS gadget, so you'll have to sync them to your computer via iTunes. The other is Photo Stream's all-inclusive behavior — it syncs every image automatically, leaving it to recipients to delete them later on. This can create extra work for spouses of tech writers who keep taking screenshots of new apps, funny error messages and other computing minutiae. (Ahem.)
Tip: Make OS X show your Library folder
Longtime Mac users found something missing in Apple's OS X Lion when it shipped last year: the Library subfolder of your user-account folder. That's where almost all applications store their data and settings, such as e-mail, address-book entries, calendar appointments and Web-browser bookmarks.
Popular Reads
ABC News Live