I currently backup my iPhone and iPad to iTunes. I’m considering switching the backups to iCloud, but I am not ready to purchase one of the additional storage plans.
If my 32 GB iPhone has 3 GB of free space, does the backup to iCloud only backup settings, phone data, etc. which would require far less space? Most of the space used on my phone is my music collection; surely it doesn’t backup all of the music as well, right?
What is the typical size of an iOS backup stored to iCloud?
Best Answer
If you use iCloud Photo Library, then your photos won’t be uploaded to iCloud for backup. The same goes if you use iTunes Match and MUSIC: you music won’t need to be uploaded to iCloud for backup.
If you don’t use those services then yes, your iCloud backup will contain your photos and music. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to restore your device the way it was.
And yet, even though I’m an iTunes Match and iCloud Photo Library user, my fairly barebones iPad takes up 1 GB of storage for backup.
My iPhone has a few more apps, (2 pages’ worth). However under iCloud → Storage, only one app stores over 200 MB (Runkeeper) with everything else taking under 50 MB. The vast majority takes up mere kilobytes. I don’t backup my Health data because this seems to be causing issues. Somehow my iPhone’s backup takes up 2.2 GB.
As far as data consumption, I believe iCloud performs differential backups, because while the initial backup takes a significant amount of time, subsequent backups seem to complete much more quickly.