How to Free up Space on iCloud – The free tier on iCloud offers a scanty 5GB of storage. Which is why most people run out space on iCloud so fast. If you have any challenge like this, we’ll show you how you get your storage cleared on iCloud.
What Does iCloud Storage Cost?
iCloud storage isn’t surprisingly expensive. If you want to upgrade to a bigger plan, rather deleting data to free up your existing storage, here is what you can do:
- $0.99 per month for 50GB
- $2.99 per month for 200GB
- $9.99 per month 2TB
You can get discounts by prices for iCloud storage together with other Apple services by subscribing to Apple One.
How Can I Free up Space on iCloud?
At any time you run out of storage and would like to free up some space, you need to check what’s taking so much space.
On an iPhone, go to Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > Manage Storage.
On a Mac, open the Apple menu and go to System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud, then click Manage.
This would show you exactly what’s taking up your space on your iCloud account. Now, I’ll show you how you can clear them.
- Get Rid Of Unwanted iCloud Backups
You can delete backups from old device that are useless to you. To do that, follow these steps.
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups.
- It would display the devices that been backed up. Click on any device name and tap Delete Backup> Turn off & Delete.
- You can also restrict some certain apps from saving their data in your iCloud account by tapping the backup of devices. To stop this, tap the device name and choose to Show All Apps. Now you can manually disable backups for specific apps and then tap Turn off & Delete.
For users of Mac, open the Apple menu and head to System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud. Next, click Manage and select Backups.
- Cut Down Your Photo Library
There are people who would rather delete all their apps than one of their pictures. For some reason it’s the best part of their lives. Since you have no choice but to free up space on iCloud, you might want to consider.
Before we show you how to do that, you should check the camera settings on your device to make sure you aren’t making use of more than you expected on iCloud. You can also decide to switch to 720p or 180p videos instead of 4K.
- On your iOS or iPadOS device, go to Settings > Camera > Formats. To save space, choose High Efficiency. Note that this will save your photos and videos in the HEIF and HEVC formats respectively, and these are not as widely supported as JPG and MP4.
- Now go back to the Camera settings and tap Record Video. Ideally, you should select the lowest frame rate and resolution. You won’t get the smoothest or highest quality videos this way, but some sacrifices need to be made to save space. On the same page, scroll down and enable Auto Low-Light FPS to reduce the file size for low-light videos.
- Return to the Camera settings and select Record Slo-mo, then select the lowest-quality option.
- You can disable Live Photos by going to Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings. Here you can disable Live Photo.
- Delete Old Messages
If you have messaged you don’t feel like reading again, you can quickly free up some space by following these steps:
- Go to Settings > Messages on your iOS or iPadOS device.
- Now scroll down to Keep Messages and change it from Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year and tap Delete.
- Next, let’s clear some of the chats that are taking up a lot of space. Go to Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > Manage Storage > Messages. Now tap Top Conversations. This will show you which of your chats are taking up a lot of space on iCloud.
- Tap Edit on the top-right and select the chats you want to delete. Then tap the trash icon in the top-right to delete a chat.
iCloud Shouldn’t Be Your Only Backup Service
If you use iCloud Drive on any of your Apple devices, you might want to check it to be sure there are no junk files taking up a lot of space.
Most of the services on iCloud are more of a “sync” service than a backup service. It’s a tiny but crucial difference that makes a big impact on how you should treat the service. This is why it is good to back up everything on your Apple devices before you proceed with freeing up space on iCloud.
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