how much space is required to restore iphone from back up

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Level 1

8 points

how much space is required to restore iphone from back up

I got stung by the facebook update today and ive gone through the restore process. this works fine and restores my phone to factory settings, however when i come to restore from back up, it gets so far before telling me ive run out of space on the hard disk on my computer. can anyone give me an estimation of how much space is actually required in order to restore a back up for a 16GB iphone. do i need the full 16gbs? this is quite frustrating as ive gone through the very long process 4 times already.

iPhone 4

Posted on Oct 11, 2011 4:43 PM

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Answer 1

Chrisc84 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 12, 2011 5:04 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Okay I managed to work away at this and get a more definitive answer so thought I post back for anyone who might encounter the same issue.

Assuming you already have your back up saved, you are not going to need twice the amount of space to complete the restore but you will need the same amount of space as the back up file itself. To find out the size of the back up file look in Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup.

The restore process ignores your music/films as it can sync those from your itunes on completion - basically your photos, txts, contacts etc are what is stored in the back up so you can estimate what would be needed based on how much space is taken up by this kind of data, but you can always find out for sure by looking in the location above.

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Answer 2

Jan 8, 2017 5:16 PM in response to Chrisc84

THANKS This thread was solid for "how much space is required to restore an iphone from back up". So just to let others know I had tried to about 2 other backups and cleared almost 30 GBs in total between the other two times, every time you attempt a backup your computer creates those files, even if it fails, they are created and they will take up space on your CPU. So you must delete the attempts on top of freeing space, becareful not to delete your main back up file. I had a 64 GB iphone 6s, probably about 10 GB space Messages and 10 GB space Photos, and it took me 28 GBs free to do this restore. So it is not a very space helpful system and I will use Icloud in the future, as I upgraded recently to the 200GB storage.

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Answer 3

Aziziazf

Level 1

4 points

Aug 20, 2017 8:01 AM in response to Naimrashid89

You need to go to your system drive.

SystemDrive(can be C or D or whatever it is named):\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Hope this helps.

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Answer 4

Feb 22, 2017 4:28 AM in response to matt11231

Hi Matt, how to lookup for those backup files? I'm using windows...

Best

Naim

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Answer 5

Nov 30, 2016 10:49 AM in response to Chrisc84

I'm struggling with this now and everytime I try to restore my backup it states that I do not have enough space for the process, could you please tell me how I find out the size of the file as I dont understand how to find the application data and the rest of it.

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Answer 6

Oct 11, 2011 5:02 PM in response to Chrisc84

You need a lot more space than the size of the content on your iPhone. Probably twice as much, as it has to "stage" the update,

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Answer 7

KiltedTim

Level 10

226,992 points

Nov 30, 2016 10:51 AM in response to panicsixlowsirens

You should probably start your own thread explaining your problem in detail as this one has been dead for 5 years, now.

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