iCloud claims I am using 58GB (I am not)

[lars666]

Hi everybody,

I have the iCloud 50 GB plan, but don't use not nearly that much – including all my iOS backups, mail, files etc. I even don't have the iCloud photo turned on. However, this morning I was surprised that my iCloud drive is full – claiming I am using 58GB of 50GB. I checked the iCloud drive on my Mac and my iOS device – it says that I am using 33,9GB of documents in the iCloud. I definitely don't unless something really went wrong and they are invisible broken "ghost files" in my iCloud or something like that. I checked everything under iCloud Drive, but there's no evidence of what uses this space.

Is there a know bug that this can happen or that some earlier files from the past (I used to have the 200GB plan with a lot of files on it, but deleted them and downgraded to 50GB a few months ago) are somehow invisibly "stuck"?

If anybody has a hint, I would be grateful if you could let me know. Thanks a lot in advance.

 

[casperes1996]

I have the iCloud 50 GB plan, but don't use not nearly that much – including all my iOS backups, mail, files etc. I even don't have the iCloud photo turned on. However, this morning I was surprised that my iCloud drive is full – claiming I am using 58GB of 50GB. I checked the iCloud drive on my Mac and my iOS device – it says that I am using 33,9GB of documents in the iCloud. I definitely don't unless something really went wrong and they are invisible broken "ghost files" in my iCloud or something like that. I checked everything under iCloud Drive, but there's no evidence of what uses this space.

Is there a know bug that this can happen or that some earlier files from the past (I used to have the 200GB plan with a lot of files on it, but deleted them and downgraded to 50GB a few months ago) are somehow invisibly "stuck"?

If anybody has a hint, I would be grateful if you could let me know. Thanks a lot in advance.

Never seen or heard of this, but I'm curious now. I take it the used amount was showing correctly after downgrading to 50GB and it's since gotten weird?

 

[lars666]

Yes, the shown "used" amount was correct after downgrading. Didn't have an eye on my storage use after that as I had enough space so – as I was surprised out of the blue today – I can't tell if this problem suddenly came over night (and maybe is a temporary bug which will disappear as quickly as it came) or if it "built up". I don't want to rule out 100% that i'm somehow overlooking data usage, but I am 99% sure that I don't as I have really checked everything. Just getting afraid now that there's some kind of bug which has invisible corrupted data "stucked" in my iCloud. In this case, I'd probably have to contact Apple directly.

 

[casperes1996]

Yes, the shown "used" amount was correct after downgrading. Didn't have an eye on my storage use after that as I had enough space so – as I was surprised out of the blue today – I can't tell if this problem suddenly came over night (and maybe is a temporary bug which will disappear as quickly as it came) or if it "built up". I don't want to rule out 100% that i'm somehow overlooking data usage, but I am 99% sure that I don't as I have really checked everything. Just getting afraid now that there's some kind of bug which has invisible corrupted data "stucked" in my iCloud. In this case, I'd probably have to contact Apple directly.

Inside iCloud Preferences, under usage, what does it report as using the space? You can list all that uses space, and see if you can find the culprit.

If it still seems weird, try this in Terminal
cd /Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs
du -h

And see if the ./. Trashes item at the top is correctly showing 0kb in size.

 

[lars666]

It shows 33,9GB of "documents" data in the icloud preferences which simply don't exist – neither as files I directly uploaded to iCloud nor taken by apps enabled to use iCloud. There's no way to go "deeper" finding those files. It simply shows 33,9 GB with no real connection to any app, folder or whatever.

Trash is shown as "0KB" with the terminal command – it is empty. Strange indeed ... Next step for me will be to log out of iCloud on every device and then log in in – maybe some upload is stuck in cloud limbo which will be "forgotten" after that. Not really optimistic, but I'll give that a try.

Thanks a lot for your help, really appreciated!

 

[lars666]

I just called Apple, was forwarded - after the normal troubleshooting - to a level 2 person which was able to reset the "corrupted" reserved iCloud space. From 32GB phantom data to 19MB in one second. There was indeed something "stuck" from a failed/awaited download in the past. Now everything's fine again.

 

[mikecwest]

Do you have any iCloud backups from your iphone? (this will take some space)

 

[lars666]

iCloud backups are separately listed and their size were correct. As described in my last post above yours, there really was some phantom data "stuck" in the iCloud which had to be reseted manually by the Apple stuff.

 

[mikecwest]

iCloud backups are separately listed and their size were correct. As described in my last post above yours, there really was some phantom data "stuck" in the iCloud which had to be reseted manually by the Apple stuff.

OK, I missed that. Glad you got it fixed.