iPhone 15 PM backup size on iCloud excessively high at 31 GB

[CyberGene]

I’ve received an email from Apple that I have almost exhausted the 200 GB iCloud storage. Seems my iPhone has a backup that takes 31.2 GB. However the breakdown doesn’t correspond to such an enormous amount. At most, the sum of all app sizes from the breakdown is 2-3 GB. For instance, my iPad has almost the same content as my iPhone and its backup is 2.5 GB. I turned the iPhone backup off and then back on and it’s again 31.2 GB. The funny thing is, it backed it up for 2 minutes and there’s no way it could upload 31.2 GB in 2 minutes, my Internet connection is not so fast. I’m on 17.4. Anyone experiencing similar issues?

 

[CyberGene]

OK, I found the culprit. To whoever it may be useful: this week I downloaded a 31 GB satnav update for my car on a SD card. However, it turned out it’s not readable by the car. So, I had to copy it over to a USB-C stick instead. But I was in the car with no computer at hand and had to improvise. I first copied the SD card content to my iPhone (using a SD-card reader with USB-C, hail the USB-C on my iPhone!) in the Files app. Then I connected a USB-C stick to the iPhone and copied over the files. And finally I deleted the files from the iPhone storage. However, seems they were moved to the Recently Deleted folder and were still there. And the backup apparently uploads them to iCloud but doesn’t report them in the breakdown.

I cleaned up the Recently Deleted folder in the Files app, turned the iCloud backup off and on once again and now the backup is just 2 GB 🥳

Case closed.