The never-ending saga of not enough iCloud space (when there actually is)

[theLemur]

iCloud lies. I can't take it anymore.

I have an iPhone 6s. The only things I want to backup are small... contacts, notes, etc. My photos and videos go to dropbox..

My 5gb slowly dwindles away, but to WHERE? I look at the items that can be deleted to free up space, ok there's some that are 100MB, delete those... free up enough to have 500MB free again. Where is the rest... 4.5GB gone, wtf? Ok so I ignore it.. fine for now as 500MB free is enough because I don't really back anything up, right?

Weeks later, warnings again for iCloud full. G'dammit... check things to delete, there basically is nothing left.. largest app is like 45MB.. then everything else is so tiny it doesn't even matter. I delete enough petty crap to get to a 500MB free again.

I decide to delete the backup and start fresh. Backup gone.. Enable backup to start upload again.

Message: "This iPhone cannot be backed up because there is not enough iCloud storage available."

What the crap? It just had 500MB free, and now it doesn't have enough to do the backup? There is nothing more I can delete!

 

[roeiz]

Yea i got tired of it so now i have no fresh backups

 

[theLemur]

Im backup up through iTunes now so i have something at least, but i really need to make sure my contacts are backed up at a bare minimum.

I'm going crazy.. there has to be a solution.. other than reinstalling from scratch and not using an old backup..

 

[roeiz]

Im backup up through iTunes now so i have something at least, but i really need to make sure my contacts are backed up at a bare minimum.

I'm going crazy.. there has to be a solution.. other than reinstalling from scratch and not using an old backup..

Im sure on of the specialits here will chime in soon.

 

[theLemur]

From searching it's a very common problem, but it's usually because people have too many photos or music, and I have all that disabled for backup.
[doublepost=1507439054][/doublepost]I went back to the backup screens and this time it defaulted to photos on for the next backup, and showed 16GB or so in that category, and it estimated the total size of the next hypothetical backup to be... 13GB. wtf? So I disable photos again, thinking.. is it going show -3GB? and it shows 4.8GB.. No sense... but it let me do the backup.. still though, some rogue data or math error remains.