How to Free Up Space in iCloud

Deletion of backups – Helpful in Conserving Valuable Storage in Apple’s iCloud

Deletion of numerous backups could be helpful in conserving valuable storage in Apple’s iCloud which is Apple’s cloud based content storage system for its Mac and iOS products. iCloud storage service of Apple can be utilised to stack photos, videos, device backups and much more in the cloud. Free space of 5GB is offered by the company to the users but since it is 5GB of space as per Apple ID and not per device, one may find themselves running short of space faster.

Though extra storage could be purchased from Apple, there are options of making up free space in the iCloud account prior to purchase of additional storage. In order to check how much space is being utilised, one could enter Setting on the iPhone or iPad and opt for `iCloud’ then click `Storage’ followed by `Manage Storage’.

There could be a possibility that the backups could be utilising most of the space and if the user has backups from the old device either from an iPhone 4 or iPad 2, which is no longer in possession, they could go ahead and delete the same, by clicking on the backup scroll which is towards the bottom, tap the `Delete Backup’.

Unwanted Items - Deleted

There could also be chances of backing up items which may not be needed and have it saved in the cloud. You could go to Setting and click on iCloud from where you could choose items which you would like to be saved to iCloud and delete whatever is not needed. This will ensure that it is not backed up when you perform a backup the next time.

A stress-free option to free up space in iCloud is to delete photos from backups and instead of having photos stored in iCloud, you could use one of the several third party cloud service which tend to provide more free space than Apple. Google Photos tends to offer unlimited storage for free. Besides this there is also Yahoo’s Flickr app, DropBox, Microsoft One Drive as well as Amazon Cloud Drive.

User could install these apps which automatically back up your photos and have the app start backing up the photos to a separate pool of storage. User would have a backup copy of the photos stored online and get to keep all of it in the iCloud storage whenever needed.

Disable Camera Roll Backups

Users may also disable Camera Roll backups wherein the photos are backed up to a different service. iCloud’s Manage Storage screen enables the user to manage `Document and Data where these are documents, settings, save games besides other bits of data which iCloud syncs between the various devices.

They depend on iCloud storage and files which are not of much importance can be deleted. One could tap an app under `Document & Data’ on the Manage Storage screen to see the files occupying space. User could swipe a file to the left and tap `Delete’ in order to erase it from the iCloud storage.

The user needs to be careful while deleting files since there could be a possibility of deleting important documents together with other files which could be of great importance.