Save money with iCloud
Be frugal by reclaiming wasted online storage capacity
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 for looking after your files, 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 of app data 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 think you’ll soon need to use it – and don’t want to run the risk of running out – you may not care to follow the advice here; if your requirements change in the future, though, you can always check back to this tutorial.
The following walkthrough is written with iOS 10.3 in mind, which is the current release as we go to press. The 10.3 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.