iMessage iCloud space

[Itzamna]

Hello there.

Can someone please help me understand what's going on here?

I started to get warnings that my iCloud storage was low and so I went to free up some space. I noticed that my iMessage was taking up near 10GB in the iCloud storage... But when I open the iMessage tab on iCloud storage it says that is using 800MB... Then if I go to my iPhone storage it says its using 400'ish MB... So... What's going on? Deleted messages that are still using up space? If so, how do I delete them?

Thank you for all the help.

 

[Helmsley]

Turn off messages in iCloud. It should then ask if you want to go delete data. Proceed with delete, then turn messages back on in iCloud so it forces a re-sync.

 

[TrueBlou]

They are separate readings for separate things. The first, of course, is the amount of space iMessage is occupying within iCloud.

However, to save your local, iPhone storage space, not all of that is stored on your iPhone. Only more recent messages and attachments will be stored locally.

Which is why you see different readings for the storage space.

To remove from your iCloud account, you were at the correct screen in the first screenshot. If you tap on it there (Settings > AppleID > iCloud > Manage Storage > Messages, you will see the option to disable and delete from iCloud.

Doing this however, has the knock-on effect that no Messages will ever be stored within iCloud anymore. Only on your device. So they won’t be restored if you get a new phone and restore from iCloud for instance. You’d have to do a manual backup on your computer if you cared about keeping them.

And of course, they will begin to take up much more storage space on your iPhone. So you would need to manually delete them every now and again, to recover local storage space.