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Unless iCloud is being stupid and your paltry couple-hundred megabyte phone won't back up to 5GB free storage. No info other than a "backup failed" message. Or

Unless iCloud is being stupid and your paltry couple-hundred megabyte phone won't back up to 5GB free storage. No info other than a "backup failed" message. Or a phone backup mysteriously decides to make a 2nd copy and there are no tools to delete the first. Both of these things have happened to me. I'll pay for iCloud backup when the tooling improves, not before.

eridius 10y ago
What do you mean, no tools to delete the first? There certainly are tools to cull stuff from your backups. The simplest way is to open the iCloud preference pane on OS X, and click "Manage". It then gives you a comprehensive list of everything in iCloud, including all backups. You can also do this on your iPhone by going to iCloud preferences, tapping Storage, and tapping Manage Storage. IIRC, the dialog about having no space even offers a button to manage your storage (though I haven't seen it in a while so I can't confirm that).
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  Yep, and after doing all of that I still couldn't delete the backup. I tried deleting it from the iPhone iCloud UI as well as the iCloud settings UI on the Mac. Neither option actually deleted the backup. For giggles I tried to dig around in the iCloud drive app but that doesn't expose anything. The Web UI is equally useless. It would be nice to have a button that just "resets all iCloud storage" but that doesn't exist either. I did find a workaround. Back up phone manually (in iTunes), wipe phone, restore the (months old) iCloud backup. I was able to delete the "newer" iCloud backup after that. I then restored my backup from the computer and the iCloud backup mysteriously started working again (registered as a single backup for my phone instead of two). This was all over a year ago, so maybe they fixed it since then. The other phone on another account still won't back up to iCloud. The backup size is a fraction of the "free space" on that iCloud account and the error message is still the cryptic "failed to back up" message.

eridius 10y ago

What do you mean, no tools to delete the first? There certainly are tools to cull stuff from your backups. The simplest way is to open the iCloud preference pane on OS X, and click "Manage". It then gives you a comprehensive list of everything in iCloud, including all backups. You can also do this on your iPhone by going to iCloud preferences, tapping Storage, and tapping Manage Storage. IIRC, the dialog about having no space even offers a button to manage your storage (though I haven't seen it in a while so I can't confirm that).

chadgeidel 10y ago
Yep, and after doing all of that I still couldn't delete the backup. I tried deleting it from the iPhone iCloud UI as well as the iCloud settings UI on the Mac. Neither option actually deleted the backup. For giggles I tried to dig around in the iCloud drive app but that doesn't expose anything. The Web UI is equally useless. It would be nice to have a button that just "resets all iCloud storage" but that doesn't exist either. I did find a workaround. Back up phone manually (in iTunes), wipe phone, restore the (months old) iCloud backup. I was able to delete the "newer" iCloud backup after that. I then restored my backup from the computer and the iCloud backup mysteriously started working again (registered as a single backup for my phone instead of two). This was all over a year ago, so maybe they fixed it since then. The other phone on another account still won't back up to iCloud. The backup size is a fraction of the "free space" on that iCloud account and the error message is still the cryptic "failed to back up" message.