Why Is My Icloud Storage Full
If youre not familiar with iCloud, you might not realize whats taking up all your storage space. Because iCloud is used for iPhone or iPad backups, as well as to store your entire photo library, the 5GB you get with a free iCloud account may not be enough.
Some of the data that you can sync to iCloud includes:
How To Upgrade Your Icloud Storage On Any Device
For unknown reasons, Apple only gives their customers 5GB of free iCloud space. If you compare that to what other cloud services offer, 5GB is extremely lousy and tight-fisted. This means that if you use your Apple devices to take many photos and videos , then that 5GB will disappear faster than Rick Astleys singing career. Therefore, you will have to upgrade your iCloud storage to a paid plan Here are the options and how you upgrade, depending on what platform youre on.
Read more: How to create or log into an iCloud account
QUICK ANSWER
To upgrade your iCloud storage, access the iCloud section on your device. Click Manage or Manage Storage, and you will see an option to change your storage plan. Choose the plan you want and pay for it using a credit card or Apple credit. Changes to the storage quota should be more or less instant.
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Manage Videos And Photos In The Photos App
Deleting photos and videos you don’t need is often the best way to clear our iCloud storage. They consume the bulk of iCloud storage for most people and unlike an app, file, or email, which you might eventually delete when it’s no longer needed, videos and photos are rarely removed until it’s a problem.
Open the app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
On iPhone tap on Albums and then scroll down to Media Types. Mac users will find Media Types listed in the left-hand navigation menu.
On iPad, tap the menu in the top left, then scroll down to the section called Media Types.
You’ll find a list of media under Media Types which includes videos, photos, panoramas, and other content. Clean the following media first, as they tend to consume the most iCloud storage space.
Delete videos and photos you no longer need.
iPhone and iPad users can do this by selecting a video or photo with a long tap and then selecting Delete from Library.
Mac users can right-click a file or files and then select Delete from the context menu.
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Check Your Icloud Space
Now, you may be eager to manage iCloud storage from Mac or iPhone with specific steps. Its really important, but only when you know what occupies the most space, you can judge which is the best way for you.
Now, lets start to check your iCloud space.
For Mac, you can navigate to Apple menu> System Preferences, click iCloud and type in Apple ID, password to sign in, then see if iCloud Drive is checked and click Manage to get details for each items on iCloud.
For iPhone or iPod, go to Settings> your Apple ID> iCloud, then you will see the used iCloud storage under Storage. Then, scroll down to APPS USING ICLOUD and you will see what apps occupies the space on iCloud.
To find what occupies the most space, click Manage Storage under Storage, then you will see used space for each items. Find out one or more apps that take up most space on iCloud and free up space from these aspects.
How To Keep Recently
When deciding what to keep on your device, iCloud Photo Library tends to prioritize the most recent images and videos you’ve taken. But there’s an even easier way to ensure your most recent video shoot is easily accessible: Pause iCloud Photo Library’s uploading.
Note: If you pause iCloud Photo Library’s upload feature, your most recent photos, and video will not be synced with iCloud or your other devices, and thus won’t be backed up anywhere. Use this method at your own risk if you don’t have an alternate backup option .
The Optimize Storage feature won’t optimize anything iCloud hasn’t already backed up if those images and video aren’t backed up, the app won’t touch them when considering what to offload.
There’s one other way to prevent iCloud Photo Library from syncing your images: by turning off cellular support for the Photos app and disabling Wi-Fi for the day. This will prevent your Photos app from uploading any images to iCloud Photo Library via cellular connection unfortunately, it also means that you won’t be able to any new images over cellular, so this method works best if you don’t need your older iCloud images.
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Option : If You Want Full
Prefer to use iCloud Photo Library’s Optimize Storage setting? That’s fine: You can still download high-resolution copies of your photos and video for viewing or editing while offline.
A quick primer on the “Optimize iPhone Storage” setting: This appropriates a percentage of your free space for photo storage this percentage fluctuates depending on how much of your storage space you’ve taken up with other content, as well.
For instance, if you have 5GB of apps on a 64GB iPhone, iCloud might allot 20GB of space to storing Photos, leaving 30GB or so for other items. If you have 15GB of apps, iCloud’s photo allotment might be closer to 10GB.
As your storage ratios change, iCloud Photo Library removes local copies of older photos using semi-intelligent rules to free up more space.
So, while you can technically download an image from iCloud Photo Library by tapping on it you’ll see a processing icon in the lower right corner of the photo as it downloads there’s no guarantee that image will stay downloaded to your iPhone forever, especially if you don’t look at it for awhile.
Clean Up Text Messages
If you send a lot of texts in Messages or, more specifically, if you send a lot of pictures and GIFs then you could be using up a lot of storage on iCloud without even realizing it. Heres a quick way to see how much space your individual conversations are taking up:
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Delete Documents And Data
Open the Manage Storage tab in iCloud settings, and move over to iCloud Drive. In this area, you will be able to see the various documents that have been saved in your iCloud Drive.
Most probably, you would not have used some of those documents for quite a while, but they still exist in your online storage. So, it will be wise to select and delete the documents that you will not need again to free up iCloud space storage space on iPad for iOS 14.
Manage Icloud Storage On Mac
When you sign in with your Apple ID and turn on iCloud, you automatically get 5 GB of free storage. You can use your iCloud storage for photos, files, backups, and more. You can increase your storage by upgrading to iCloud+. See What is iCloud+?
You can also remove items stored in iCloud to make more space available. See the Apple Support article Free up storage space on your Mac.
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For Ios 103 And Later
Step #1: Tap on Settings app iCloud.
Step #2: If your device is running on iOS 11 tap on Manage Storage Backup.
On iOS 10.3, tap on iCloud Storage Manage Storage.
Step #3: Next, you need to tap on the name of iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch connected with your iCloud account.
Step #4: Scroll down and tap Delete Backup.
A pop-up will ask your confirmation tap on Turn Off & Delete to confirm your action.
Delete Unwanted Files In Icloud Drive From Your Ipad Or Iphone
1. On your iPhone or iPad, launch the Files app.
2. Tap “Browse” at the bottom of the screen.
3. In the Locations section, select “iCloud Drive.”
4. To delete an entire folder, tap “Select” in the screen’s top right.
5. Then, choose the folder and tap the Delete icon.
6. To delete files, open the folder they’re contained in.
7. Use “Select” to choose files and delete them.
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Option A: How To Get More Icloud Storage Buy More Space
Getting more iCloud storage space is straightforward and can be done through your iPhone or iPad.
To get more storage, select manage storage in the iCloud settings.
Now, select change storage plan. Here you will be presented with a selection of upgrade options ranging from 50GB to 2TB of storage. Select the option thats best for you and tap buy in the top right-hand corner.
Delete A Message Or Attachment On Your Iphone Or Ipad
Delete multiple attachments from a contact or conversation
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Check How Much Storage Is Available
On your Windows computer, open iCloud for Windows.
The bar graph shows your overall storage usage.
For information about any segment of the bar graph, hold the pointer over the segment until its name and numeric storage size appear above the graph.
On the left, you see a list of apps and features and how much iCloud storage they use. The apps and features that use the most storage are at the top of the list. You can click an app or feature for more information.
Check Available Icloud Storage Space
You can check the available iCloud storage to see how much space left. Here is how to check available iCloud storage space on your iPhone, iPad and iPad Touch:
- For iOS 10.3 or later: select “Settings” > “” > “iCloud“. Tap “iCloud Storage” or “Manage Storage“.
- For iOS 10.2 or older: select Settings > iCloud > Storage.
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Use Finder To View Icloud Drive Files On A Mac
Finder is the best way to find and manage any files on your Mac or in your iCloud Drive storage. You can even combine the two by enabling the Desktop & Documents Folders option in your iCloud Drive settings, to sync those folders from your Mac to iCloud.
To view iCloud Drive folders on your Mac, open a new Finder window and select iCloud Drive from the sidebar.
If you don’t see an iCloud Drive option, go to Finder > Preferences from the menu bar. Then click Sidebar and enable the iCloud Drive option.
Interact with these files and folders the same way you would any other file or folder on your Mac.
Where To Find Icloud
Apple’s iCloud service is offered across various devices, including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. You can also use iCloud storage on Windows devices through Apple’s file hosting service, iCloud Drive. There’s also a web app located at iCloud.com that’s reachable from Safari and other browsers.
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Quick Ways To Free Up Icloud Storage
Once youve determined how much youre using, you can delete anything that you dont think youll need.
How To Access And Manage Icloud Drive Files From Any Device
iCloud Drive is great, but you need to use a different method to access your files on an iPhone, Mac, Windows PC, or Android device.
With iCloud Drive, you can save any kind of file to your iCloud storage. But how you access all the files in your iCloud Drive storage changes depending on whether you’re using an iPhone, a Mac, a Windows PC, or an Android device.
We’ll show you how to access iCloud Drive on any device. With it, you can edit documents, upload files, or free up some iCloud storage no matter where you are or what you’re using.
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How To Set Up Icloud Keychain
iCloud Keychain is Apple’s attempt to bring password management to the mainstream. With it, your account names, passwords, and even credit cards numbers can be safely and securely stored on your iPhone or iPad keychain, and synced across all your devices thanks to iCloud. In conjunction with Safari, it can also generate new, unique passwords, and autofill them whenever you need them. So, how does it all work?
How To Free Up Icloud Storage
Upon checking your iCloud storage you find that you are running out of storage, you may want to free up some of the space by removing unwanted stuff from your iCloud account. Getting rid of various file types from an iCloud account is often a tedious task to do on an Apple device. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use a third-party dedicated app to get the task done for your iCloud account.
Enter AnyTrans, an application that allows you to fetch data from your iCloud account over to your computer. Once the data is available on your computer, you can get it removed from your iCloud account and that should free-up your storage space.
The app is capable of letting you transfer various types of content but we are going to show you how you can use it to get your iCloud contacts transferred over to your local machine. Steps for transferring other file types are similar so you should not have any issues.
Step 1. on your computer > Launch it.
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Step 2.Click on iCloud Manager > Enter your Apple ID and Password in the app.
Sign in iCloud Account in AnyTrans
Step 3. Click on the categories icon on the following screen. Here we will take Contacts for an example.
Export iCloud Backups via AnyTrans
Step 4. Select the contacts you wish to manage > Click on the Download to Computer button or Delete button at the top to manage the selected photos and free up iCloud storage.
Choose the Contacts to Export
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Change Your Icloud Settings
iCloud settings lets you choose which apps on your device use iCloud to stay up to date. Learn how to change your iCloud settings, or turn off iCloud completely.
When you turn on iCloud for an app, its information is safely stored in iCloud and automatically kept in sync across your devices. When you turn it off, the app will no longer connect with iCloud, so your data will exist only on your device. You can choose which apps on your device you’d like to use iCloud, or turn off iCloud completely.
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How To Manage Icloud Storage On Iphone
Method 1: Turn off some apps using iCloud. Go to Settings> your Apple ID> iCloud, then slide to APPS USING ICLOUD and click the green button next to app you dont want to backup. Please remember that the app data will only be stored on this device if you disable it.
Method 2: Delete Backups on device no longer using. Go to iCloud option, click Manage Storage and Backups, select the device you are no longer using, tap on Delete Backup and Turn Off & Delete respectively.
Method 3: Optimize iPhone storage on iCloud Photos. Go to iCloud and click under APP USING ICLOUD, then click Optimize iPhone Storage. iCloud Photos will upload your photos to cloud storage automatically while this option can replace the full-resolution photos and videos with smaller, device-sized versions.
Method 4. Upload to My Photo Stream Instead of iCloud Photo Library. Go to , click the green button to turn off iCloud Photo Library and tap grey button next to Upload to My Photo Stream.
Method 5: Clean the Mailbox. If you use iCloud as your primary email account, it will take tons of space. To free up space on mail, go to mail app of Apple and Inbox, swipe left over an email and tap on Trash. Then, open the trash folder, tap on Edit and click Delete All.
Also, you can delete conversions in a message: open specific message, press and hold a conversion, select “More” and one or more conversion need to be deleted, then click “Delete Message“.