iPhone iCloud Backup

Question

Level 1

5 points

iPhone iCloud Backup

Hello,

I use an iPhone 6s 128GB Gold. I recently saw, that my iPhone Backup is 17GB big, and I started to wonder, where those 17GB come from, since iCloud is not backing up Apps, Podcasts, Music and other Media. The research i did just confused me even more. The Data iCloud stores from all the App's does not add up to 17GB (by far).

And what else confused me, was that there are apps, that actually contain way more Data than they appear to have on the Backup, for example my dict.cc Dictionary app, which contains 250MB worth of Data is only backing up 15MB.

The same problem with my Google Maps app, which stores a large map.

Can anybody help me and clear things up? Thank you very much!

-Yannick

iPhone 6s, iOS 9.3.2

Posted on Jun 21, 2016 4:50 PM

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Answer 1

Yannickbi Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 26, 2016 1:22 PM in response to gail from maine

Yes it might have been the photos I don't know... I just when I counted all the data from every single app together, that is listed (e.g. picture above), I only came to around 5 GB worth of data. So by far no 17GB... I knew that there might be some pictures that I have not imported yet or something. but i was sure, that it was not 12GB worth of data.

What i now did, is, I deleted and deactivated iCloud Backup and then started a new one. And this new backup is only 6.7 GB big, about as big as I expected it to be.

Strange... But there must have been some knot that used up all this space... I have no explanation for this. I now just seems to work.

Thank you for your help!

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Answer 2

Jun 26, 2016 1:22 PM in response to Yannickbi

You are correct. The additional GB would not be iCloud Drive or Mail. I was thinking about iCloud Storage in general. However, if your text or iMessages contain a lot of photos or videos, that will drive up the size of the backup.

As for the App, once the initial backup is done, subsequent backups only back up things that have changed since the last one. So, your last backup was 17.5 GB, and contains all of your Photos and backup data, the next scheduled one only will send up 473 MB to update the info that has changed. So, the size of the data being backed up represents only the part of that data that is going to go up with the current backup.

I don't really know why the previous backup size was so large, but I know that on my device, the size of the Photo Library listed for my backup is smaller than my actual Photo Library. Is it possible that you had a lot of photos that had not been backed up prior to the 17.5 GB one? The sizes you see represented on the backup list are the actual sizes of the amount of data that is going to be sent on the upcoming backup only.

Does that help?

Also, this article may help you to determine if the items that you do not see on the backup list, but which are included in the backup, could be contributing to the overall backup size:

iCloud: iCloud storage and backup overview

Cheers,

GB

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Answer 3

Yannickbi Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 21, 2016 5:54 PM in response to ManSinha

Yes, I did already know that. But this does not answer my question... I wasn't wondering what data is not being backed up. I was wondering where those 17GB come from. I am well aware, that data that is already being synced over iCloud is not backed up again.

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Answer 4

Jun 21, 2016 7:15 PM in response to Yannickbi

Mail, iCloud Drive, Documents and Data are also backed up. They may help account for the size. In addition, if you have a lot of photos or videos in your Messages, those would also take up a lot of room.

As for the app only backing up 15MB, Apps are not themselves backed up. Only the data for those apps is backed up, if they have any. Apps, Music, and all other iTunes purchased media are re-loaded once you restore from a backup.

Cheers,

GB

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Answer 5

Yannickbi Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 21, 2016 7:52 PM in response to gail from maine

Thank you very much for your answer. Well yes but iCloud Drive is not backed up within those 17GB of my iPhone backup, isn't it?

And yes i am well aware of all the things you listed, but don't my pictures that i posted prove that my apps (Google Maps, dict.cc) contain data (over 15MB), which seems to be excluded on my backup?

Thank you very much!

-Yannick

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Answer 6

valenokk

Level 1

14 points

Jun 26, 2016 1:02 PM in response to Yannickbi

As far as I understand apps can exclude certain data from backups to save backup space. Offline maps and downloadable dictionaries are a good example of such data, which is easily restored after initial run on a new device.

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Answer 7

Yannickbi Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 26, 2016 1:03 PM in response to valenokk

Oh that makes sense I did not know that. thank you very much! I thought that all the data within the apps is going to get backed up, but i did not know that if there is some "non-personal" data like maps or dictionaries, that they will be excluded! Thank you very much!

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Answer 8

ManSinha

Level 6

12,183 points

Jun 21, 2016 5:46 PM in response to Yannickbi

Apologies if you have already read this - data such as contacts that are already stored are not backed up

iCloud: iCloud storage and backup overview - Apple Support

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Answer 9

Jun 26, 2016 2:29 PM in response to Yannickbi

You are most welcome! Glad you are all set now 🙂

Cheers,

GB

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