How to free up space in iCloud

Apple’s iCloud storage service can be used to stash away photos, videos, device backups, and more in the cloud. The company offers users 5GB of space for free, however because it’s 5GB of space per Apple ID and not per device, you may find yourself running out of space faster than you would like. While additional storage can be purchased from Apple, there are ways to free up space in your iCloud account.

Check your space

To see how much space you are using, enter Settings on your iPhone or iPad, select iCloud, click Storage & Backup, followed by Manage Storage.

Delete old backups

There is a good chance that your backups are taking up most of your space. If you have backups from your old device, say from an iPhone 4 or iPad 2 that you no longer own, you can just go ahead and delete those. Simply click on the backup scroll to the bottom and tap Delete Backup.

Change backup settings

You may have also backed up things in your most recent backup that you didn’t really need to have saved in the cloud. If this is the case, click on the most recent backup and scroll down to see all of the backed up data. If you find something you really don’t care about, flip the switch to off to delete the data. This will also make sure it isn’t backed up the next time you perform a backup.

Alternative photo services

An easy way to free up a ton of space in iCloud is to delete photos from your backups. Instead of having photos stored in iCloud, I recommend using one of the many third-party cloud services that offer even more free space than Apple. There is Yahoo’s Flickr app, Microsoft One Drive, Google+, DropBox and Amazon Cloud Drive, and many others. Check out this article for more information.

There is also your iCloud Photo Stream. While this doesn’t actually take up space in iCloud, photos are only stored on Apple’s servers for 30 days. If you end up using one of the other cloud services to store your photos, I recommend disabling the iCloud Photo Stream feature. This can be done by going to Settings, clicking on iCloud, selecting Photos and flipping the My Photo Stream switch to off.