JosephWit

Q: Can't delete iCloud backup, storage full

After upgrading my iPhone 6 Plus to IOS 9, my iCloud storage shows 5GB of my 25GB available. It shows an iPad Air (not yet updated to iOS9) backup of  516MB, and an iPhone backup of 0 KB, which I cannot delete (This backup cannot be deleted at this time). Documents and Data only 6.9MB, but only 5 GB available, and not enough room to continue to back up the iPhone. The 19GB iPhone backup appears to have been corrupted and cannot be deleted or updated by the phone. Looks like lots of folks are having similar issues. Any solutions?


Apple has been spending lots of energy creating new, exciting products but has been lax on supporting the back end, which is just as important. iCloud for Windows still not updated for Windows 10, and iTunes has issues with Windows 10, not resolved in iTunes 12.3. Come on, Apple!

iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 9

Posted on Sep 19, 2015 11:49 AM

Close

Q: Can't delete iCloud backup, storage full

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

Previous Page 2 of 4 last Next
  • by gail from maine,

    gail from maine gail from maine Sep 19, 2015 9:53 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 7 (26,148 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 19, 2015 9:53 PM in response to JosephWit

    I was just letting you know where you could turn off items to back up as you asked. Contacts and Calendars are not included in an iCloud backup. Neither are Notes, Photo Stream, Mail, or Reminders. These are continually sync'd with iCloud so they are not backe up.

     

    What you will see in your backup list are things like Photos (camera roll, sync'd and saved photos) and Apps.

     

    Cheers,

     

    GB

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 19, 2015 10:40 PM in response to gail from maine
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 19, 2015 10:40 PM in response to gail from maine

    Well, after turning off all apps in the iPhone backup settings (except Yelp - thought I might need to leave at least one), I was able to create a new iCloud backup 1.4GB in size, which fit in the 5GB I showed remaining. I now show 3.6GB remaining. There is no indication that there are 2 backups present except for the missing 19GB of space. Creating a new backup did not get rid of the corrupted invisible old one.
    I assume that since I am paying for iCloud storage, Apple support will have to talk to me, hard as it is to reach a real person there...

    Thanks, JW

  • by milypan,

    milypan milypan Sep 19, 2015 10:50 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 19, 2015 10:50 PM in response to JosephWit

    I deleted all my backups and still had 2.6 GB of space consumed. I strongly suspect that what happened is that at some point a backup didn't complete – most likely on my iPad – and the 2.6 GB is reserved for an incomplete backup. This might be related to enrolling in the iOS 9 Public Beta program (something I greatly regret doing now...what I didn't appreciate is just what a huge pain in the *** it would be to get off the program). The reason I suspect that an incomplete backup is to blame is that I had to restore my iPad to get back to the normal release builds, and as soon as I restored my iPad to factory settings and synced with iCloud another 2+ GB of space got allocated to backups on iCloud.com (which corresponded to the expected size of the new iPad backup) even though no new deletable backups appeared in my Manage Storage settings. Once I turned off iCloud backups on my iPad, then the extra 2 GB of backups on iClould.com disappeared. So I suspect there's some version of my iPad that started to backup but got interrupted, and then the iPad got wiped, and now there's no way that I can delete the backup because that version of the iPad doesn't exist anymore.

     

    Please let us know if you get any help from Apple Support. Given the very limited user options for troubleshooting this issue, I'm pretty much to the point where I'll just pay an extra $20/year to upgrade to 200 GB and stop thinking about it. I don't even care about the money, but it's just annoying to think that I might be paying them more for not fixing their own bugs.

  • by gail from maine,

    gail from maine gail from maine Sep 19, 2015 10:56 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 7 (26,148 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 19, 2015 10:56 PM in response to JosephWit

    Now that you created a new one, have you tried the Settings>iCloud>Storage>Manage Storage, select device, Delete Backup route again?

     

    Cheers,

     

    GB

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 19, 2015 11:08 PM in response to gail from maine
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 19, 2015 11:08 PM in response to gail from maine

    It shows only the new smaller 1.4GB backup. Delete fails for this one, same as before "unable to delete right now".

     

    Phone call scheduled with Apple support 10:30 tmrw morning...

  • by gail from maine,

    gail from maine gail from maine Sep 19, 2015 11:13 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 7 (26,148 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 19, 2015 11:13 PM in response to JosephWit

    Best of luck!

     

    Cheers,

     

    GB

  • by Tony_Neutral Bay,

    Tony_Neutral Bay Tony_Neutral Bay Sep 20, 2015 2:28 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 20, 2015 2:28 PM in response to JosephWit

    Exactly the same thing has happened to me on my iPhone 5s. It says the last back up was 0kb, yet 14 gigs remains unaccounted for. Deleting the backup doesn't work and it won't allow me to create a new backup. Tried this on my iPad 2 Air and no problems. I successfully backed up my phone to iTunes. It seems to be an issue with the iCloud server and is very frustrating. I plan to get a new 6s, but my concern is I might have the same problem if there is an issue with my iCloud account.

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 20, 2015 3:07 PM in response to Tony_Neutral Bay
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 20, 2015 3:07 PM in response to Tony_Neutral Bay

    I spent the morning on the phone with Apple. After making me sign out of iCloud and back in, then wiping and restoring my phone (what do you expect??), they finally escalated the ticket. They were able to "release the storage space", which immediately gave me back the missing space (corrupted directory on Apple server as I said all along), but on my iPhone it still shows a backup of 0kb that I cannot delete. I will make a new backup of the phone, since I now have room, and see if that allows the date and backup size to catch up with reality...

    The Apple folks were very nice. They gave me contact info (which I may need to use still!), and promised they would stay on it until it was fixed.

  • by milypan,

    milypan milypan Sep 20, 2015 3:10 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 20, 2015 3:10 PM in response to JosephWit

    When they released your storage space, did it only wipe your backups (if even that)? I don't want all of my iCloud documents and data getting wiped out in the process..

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 20, 2015 3:13 PM in response to milypan
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 20, 2015 3:13 PM in response to milypan

    No it didn't. Other backups and docs still there.

  • by Evizerate,

    Evizerate Evizerate Sep 22, 2015 1:55 AM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 22, 2015 1:55 AM in response to JosephWit

    Something similar happened to me.

     

    Till 3 days ago, I was using iCloud backup just fine, I had just 5gb so the Photo library backup was turned off.

    When Apple announced prices for iCloud storage would go down, I decided to give it a try in order to use iCloud Photo Library.

     

    After 2 days uploading, my iCloud Photo Library accounted for 12.2gb, fine. But then my iPhone backup was taking 10.2gb... iCloud was backing up my photos through 2 channels...

     

    I decided to wait one day before turning off the Photo backup, but then today this option disappeared! The backup was taking 10.2gb but the option to uncheck Photos wasn't there anymore.

     

    So I decided to turned off the whole backup for this iPhone. Can't. I get the error.

     

    This is when I visited this thread.

     

    I then entered the iCloud settings through my iPad, and deleted the iPhone backup just fine!

     

    The 10.2gb aren't there anymore.

     

    The iPhone is backing up again now, but there is a small phrase at the bottom of its backup page: "Photo Library is backed up separately as part of iCloud Photo Library"

     

    Good!

     

    The iPhone finished its backup, it's just 340 mb now.

     

     

    Hope it works for you!

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 22, 2015 11:43 AM in response to Evizerate
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 22, 2015 11:43 AM in response to Evizerate

    Glad you got it straightened out.

     

    For me, it was definitely a corruption of the backup directory on the Apple server. Nothing I could do from any device worked. They also saw that had less than 4GB of files listed, but only 5GB out of my 25GB available. Apple tech support had a supervisor "release my storage space", at their end, which immediately restored the missing space, but did not erase any of the files present. I was then able to make a new 19GB backup of my phone, and all seems to be working OK now.
    I'm sure Apple supports this, because I am paying for the storage. I wish we could get that level of support on other issues!

  • by milypan,

    milypan milypan Sep 23, 2015 11:32 AM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 23, 2015 11:32 AM in response to JosephWit

    I had scheduled an Apple Support call for 11:30 today, but somehow in the period before the call the problem resolved itself (i.e., I am no longer "missing" about 3GB of space). Well, saves time for both me and the support people.

  • by axl1126,

    axl1126 axl1126 Sep 30, 2015 10:06 PM in response to JosephWit
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 30, 2015 10:06 PM in response to JosephWit

    I am going through the same issue, and the bottom line is Apple escalated my case, and engineering will be removing incomplete backups from my iCloud in a few days.  This happened after I upgraded to iCloud Drive. I also installed the latest 9.0.2 IOS update, to no avail.

     

    Apole REALLY SCREWED this one up.

  • by JosephWit,

    JosephWit JosephWit Sep 30, 2015 10:58 PM in response to axl1126
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 30, 2015 10:58 PM in response to axl1126

    YUP....

Previous Page 2 of 4 last Next