Messages Documents and Data greatly exceeds total of conversations/Photos/Videos/Other

Steve Kale wrote:

You are wrong on iCloud as well. The WHOLE point of iCloud storage for, say, Photos, iCloud Drive etc is to offload them to the cloud and so not consume storage on the iPhone. Only photos being viewed are downloaded locally. IOS 11+ introduced the ability to have Messages stored on iCloud to free up local storage as well.

I am absolutely, positively NOT wrong about that the WHOLE point of iCloud storage is SYNC, not offloading iPhone storage. If you go on believing you are right you are going to lose a lot of data that you think you saved to iCloud.

The evidence is right here in the forum, with regular cries of anguish from people who thought what you think, deleted stuff from their phone “knowing” it would be stored in iCloud, then crying because it wasn’t. Why don’t you try for yourself? Enable contact sync, open Contacts, create a new contact, then go to iCloud.com and view the contact. Now delete it from your phone and try to find it in icloud.com. Try it with photos, also. Delete a photo from your phone, then try to find it in iCloud. You can try it with Messages also; delete a message thread, then try to recover it from iCloud. You can’t. While you can’t view messages in icloud.com, you can see them in other iOS devices if you have any.

But, as you know better, there’s no point in my continuing in this thread. You will find out for yourself in time that I am correct.

BTW, read the appletoolbox link carefully; the headline does not agree with the text, which says the same thing I said.

Because there are other documents and data on your phone that are either shared not part of any app or listed with the app. Open the Files app to see some of this data. And when you tap on an app you will see a listing for documents & data for each app. Surely you have more apps in that list than top conversations, photos, videos and other. I have about 300 apps listed. But even if I only include the built in apps there are a couple of dozen.

The articles are wrong.

I finally see where you are looking. I missed it before, for which I apologize. Mine shows something completely different. It’s clear to me that they are not additive: It’s the listed items PLUS Documents & Data, so Documents & Data is all of the message content that is not Top Conversations, Photos, Videos and Other.

Go to every app in the list in Settings/General/iPhone Storage and write down the amount for Documents & Data for each app, then add them up. Then open the Files app and write down the size of each file and add them to the total from Settings/General/iPhone Storage.

Documents & Data is the TOTAL data usage of all apps on your phone. It is not just the usage of messages. It is pointless to compare the size of Documents & Data to the data size of any one app. Other than Media, Photos, Books and Apps (which is only the size of the app code, not data) all other content on the phone is lumped together into Documents & Data.

And no, using iCloud does not reduce the storage needs of any app on the phone. iCloud is a syncing app; it mirrors what is on your phone, it doesn’t offload data from your phone. It’s purpose is to make content available across multiple devices, so any data on your phone is also visible on your iPad, your Mac, on https://icloud.com and your PC if you install iCloud for Windows on it. If you delete something from your phone it is also deleted from iCloud and all of the other devices you sync to iCloud. The only exception is photos; you can choose Optimize Storage in Settings/[your name]/iCloud/Photos and it will save lower resolution, compressed images on the phone, but keep the full sized images in iCloud.

Documents & Data does not include any of the items you listed. It is content from other apps and other content synced to iCloud.