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I keep getting emails saying iCloud is full

Hello Apple Community,


I have a bit of a sticky situation with my iCloud account. I keep getting emails and messages all the time on my devices saying iCloud is full. But I know I don’t use iCloud for hardly anything, I backup photos to a different service, and I use other services when I can for document storage. But when I went in, I was amazed, confused, and genuinely mystified on how I had supposedly 2GB of Messages in iCloud! I thought, I’ve always been told text takes hardly any storage, and I have it set to delete messages after 30 days, which has always kept my storage down. But now anymore for whatever reason. I went and looked to see if the setting had been changed to Forever again, and it had, so I switched it back to 30 Days. But it didn’t fix the issue. I went and deleted all the attachments I could find and it still says it takes 2GB of storage in iCloud. I gave up and now I’m annoyed at all the emails and messages I get daily. I went and click on my iCloud banner, clicked iCloud, clicked manage storage, and I clocked on the top most item taking the most storage, messages, 2GB and guess what I see, 40MB or conversations! This makes absolutely zero sense! Please, I need help!


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Aug 19, 2021 9:30 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 19, 2021 9:36 AM

If you deleted a lot of texts and attachments, it may take some time for the iCloud sync to catch up. One thing you could do is hit "Disable and Delete" to get your texts removed from iCloud. Once finished and your storage reflects this, delete any other texts you want, and turn Messages sync back on to re-upload and re-index the remaining texts. This will take up much less room.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 19, 2021 9:36 AM in response to -Captain-

If you deleted a lot of texts and attachments, it may take some time for the iCloud sync to catch up. One thing you could do is hit "Disable and Delete" to get your texts removed from iCloud. Once finished and your storage reflects this, delete any other texts you want, and turn Messages sync back on to re-upload and re-index the remaining texts. This will take up much less room.

Aug 19, 2021 10:21 AM in response to -Captain-

It should not mess that up. That feature to which you are referring is "Text Message Forwarding". Disabling the Message sync in iCloud only changes where messages are physically stored and backed up. You are just purging them from your iCloud backup, then telling it to go ahead and save them to iCloud again.


Leaving the "sync" off would then have the texts included in your hard iCloud backup. That is the backup that gets restored when setting up a new phone. The "sync" as opposed to a full backup just allows the data to be downloaded to the phone without doing a full software restore. This prevents any software issues from migrating over to a new phone since the whole phone and software is included in a backup. When things are "synced" to iCloud, it filters out the software of your device and just backs up the data. There are pros and cons to both, but no it will not affect your text forwarding setup.

I keep getting emails saying iCloud is full

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