Thought I would review this basic tip today since I helped two people at work with it on the same day. “I'm out of iCloud storage space! I haven't backed up my phone since October!”

I find a lot of colleagues are beginning to own multiple Apple devices, usually an iPhone and an iPad. With (only) 5GB to share between all devices, it's important to know which files should be backed up and which don't necessarily need backup.

Why iCloud?

iCloud backup will come in most handy when you either have to do a full restore on a device for some reason, if you lose your device, or if you're upgrading it. If you set iCloud to back up your device every day, then setting up a new device to restore your old apps is a easy and pain-free.

If you find yourself running out of iCloud storage, perhaps because you might have more than one Apple device, here's how to check and manage your storage. As you can see from the image below, I only have 830 MB left myself.

Manage your Storage

Go to: Settings, iCloud, Storage and Backup, Manage Storage.

You will then see all the devices you have under your account, then you'll be able to manage the iCloud settings. You will only be able to manage the storage on that particular device. So if you want to check to your iPad storage if you're on your iPhone, you will be able to see their amount of storage taking up, but you cannot change it. Go do the same steps to manage storage on your other device to do so.

You can then go to the back up options and toggle on and off which things you want iCloud back up. In both instances where I helped my coworkers, they had camera roll backup, taking up almost 4 GB of space. I toggled the camera backup took off, and their storage is now plentiful.

Check how much storage each app is taking, you can then turn whatever you don't need to “off”. For example, I don't need to save my Evernote material because it's already packed up on Evernote's servers.

It would be safe to say that most people will not want to spend more on iCloud storage because it is a yearly payment. Everyone is allotted 5 GB free iCloud space, which actually is very small compared to some of the offerings out there.

Solution to backup your photos elsewhere, is some of the apps that offer automatic camera roll uploads. Dropbox, Google+, and Flickr now will automatically backup your photos. Once backed up, you can freely delete them off your device, and they will be safe in cloud storage.

In terms of Apple's Photostream, remember that Apple will only backup your last 1000 photos, and not your videos. So if you take a lot of photos, this is not a good solution for backup.

Here are the upgrade options for Apple iCloud. The small problem with purchasing it one year is that you'll probably need to buy it every year on an ongoing basis, since you'll be so used to having the additional storage. The prices are not overly expensive, but, once again, if you compare it to the larger offerings from other services, they do seem pricey:

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Related post:

How to manage local storage on your iPad