I currently am on the 200gb tier for iCloud storage, with the bulk of it being Photos library backup (photos and videos). Over the years, I’ve upgraded from 5gb to 50gb and now to 200gb. Unfortunately, my iPhone backup is around 50gb (crazy to me that this is somehow so big?) and the rest is Photos backup so I’m maxed out on my 200gb storage… to the point where I can no longer actively sync photos and and my iPhone won’t backup to the cloud. So I’ve gotta do something. I could always go through my library and delete some of the larger, 4k videos I have to temporarily free up some space. But this isn’t a long term solution. I also feel that 1TB is just such an obnoxious jump in space for my needs (no family sharing option for me). What do the rest of you guys do for this, as I feel I can’t be the only individual person with an iPhone backup and 150gb+ worth of memories that I want saved? The whole point of keeping these things in my library and synced is for easy access/on the go viewing on all my devices, so I don’t love the idea of manually deleting things (and backing them up elsewhere, not totally deleting) just to make more storage space? But also hate the jump from 200gb to 1Tb, especially at $3 per month to $10. Curious what you guys do or if you have any advice or workflow suggestions for storage in this high resolution era?
I am a step behind you. I reluctantly upgraded to 200 gb in the last 6 months. It helped that I added my wife to the family plan. I had off loaded a bunch of stuff to hard drives when I first went to a MacBook Air with a tiny ssd.
One of the interim steps I took was to move my iphotos library to an external hard drive.
Now with all this space, I am thinking of putting old pics and videos back into Photos.
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I got to this point a little while ago and upgraded from the 200GB plan to the 2TB plan (there wasn’t a 1TB plan available)
My thought at the time was whether my time managing this was worth more than the extra money and I came to the conclusion that it was. I can find any photo at any time from anywhere (so long as I have data) and my backup is pretty current so it was worth the extra peace of mind.
If the phone backup and the photos cannot be pared back, and having everything in the Photos library available all the time is essential, then isn’t buying more storage the only choice? I suppose you could move the photos to another cloud service, or onto an external SSD, but then your requirements will not be met.
I clinged to the 200GB for many years. Just curious, what do you have in your iPhone that needs to be backup and is not photos or iCloud?
I managed to recover a lot of space deleting duplicate videos and duplicate photos (RAW & JPG from the time I had a DSLR) so that’s my only tip. Also recompressing videos.
Finally I reached the point that @geoffaire mentions and jumped to the 2TB tier. I feel like a 1TB tier for, say, 5€/month would be nicer (no wonder the “services” income line is going sooo well for Apple) but in the end it’s about the time you spend fumbling with your setup.
Really appreciate the great thoughts and comments here. You guys nailed it on the head, mainly with the “what other option do you have” haha and mainly that the time saved and convenience is just worth the extra money at this point. I just needed to hear it from somebody else haha. But you are right, no 1TB option - I was confused. So 2TB seems like way too much but at this point, whatever haha.