Reclaim wasted iCloud space

Be frugal and get back your online storage capacity with

It’s tempting to leave certain settings on your iPhone or iPad on their defaults, not least iCloud Backup — how many times has the importance of backing up been hammered into your brain, after all. That may seem like the safest strategy, but ask yourself whether it’s costing you more money than necessary.

While writing this tutorial, we were shocked to discover that iCloud Backup was putting 941MB of data from Tweetbot and 459MB from Amazon Music online. Neither of those apps stores anything we can’t easily obtain again. So if you’re trying to stay within the 5GB Apple provides for free with all iCloud accounts, we suggest checking the space your backups are taking up, and whether that’s close to costing money that you don’t really need to spend.

However, if you’re already paying for more space in your iCloud account, and an ample amount remains free, you may not care to follow our advice here, as it isn’t going to change anything for the better for you, at least for now.

The following walkthrough is written with iOS 10.3 in mind, which was released just as we went to press. That update relocates some of the settings you’ll need to access, but the same principles apply in previous versions — instead of tapping the new consolidated row for your Apple ID, iCloud, iTunes and App Store accounts at the top of Settings, scroll down and look in the discrete iCloud submenu instead.