How To Erase Old Iphone Backups

Quick Navigation:

Section 1. How to delete old iCloud backups?
Section 2. What happens when you delete iCloud backups or photos?
Section 3. How to safely delete your iPhone backup?

Want to remove iCloud backup for more storage

I'm running out of iCloud space on iPhone so I think I would delete old backup to empty iCloud storage. I would like to know what happens when I delete iCloud backups? Will my iCloud photos be deleted, too?

- Question from Apple Community

Caring your data is important and the best way to protect your iPhone data is backing up iPhone. iCloud makes it easy to backup iPhone. You could save your data to the cloud or create a full iCloud backup of iPhone with Internet.

You might have created iCloud backup on iPhone and consider deleting iCloud backup to clean up iCloud space so that you could add new content to iCloud. It is wise to think before you act. What happens if you delete iCloud backup? You would get the answer in the following content.

Section 1. How to delete old iCloud backups?

You have just 5GB of free space in iCloud so you might need to delete old iCloud backup to free up iCloud storage or solve iCloud issues like iCloud backup stuck. You could delete your old iPhone backups by the following steps:

Go to iPhone Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups, select the unwanted task and delete it. Or download iCloud for Windows to computer and sign in with your Apple ID > click Storage > click Backups. Select the unnecessary backup and delete it.

You could try deleting iCloud backup on computer if you can't delete iCloud backup on iPhone with slow Internet.

Delete iPhone Backups on PC

Section 2. What happens when you delete iCloud backups or photos?

Is it OK to delete backup on iCloud? You should think twice about that because once you delete your iCloud backup, the backup copy would be erased immediately and it could not be recovered. After that, iCloud Backup would be automatically turned off in iPhone Settings.

If you just turn off iCloud backup on iPhone by yourself, iCloud will stop backing up iPhone to iCloud and it would do nothing to the old iPhone backups.

If you care whether your photos or messages would be also erased with the disappearing of iCloud backup, you should go to Manage Storage in iCloud setting and see whether your photos or messages are listed. As is mentioned before, if you have saved photos and messages to iCloud before backing up iPhone, they would be not involved in that backup.

You could delete iCloud photos or contacts on the site of iCloud and recover them in 30 days.

Most files on iCloud could not be viewed, but you could check iCloud photos and contacts on the site of iCloud and download iCloud backup to PC.

View Photos on iCloud

You have known the answer to the question that "what happens when I delete iCloud backup" now.

What would you lose if you delete iCloud backup?

iCloud would not save all the iPhone data to the cloud. It is not the way Apple does because they always stress simplicity. iCloud backup is designed to completely restore iPhone but it would just save the necessary data like iPhone Settings and most local data.

If you delete iCloud backup, your photos, messages, and other app data will be permanently removed. Your music files, movies, and the apps themselves are not in iCloud backups. You can download them on iPhone any time you want.

Section 3. How to safely delete your iPhone backup?

If you don't know what happens when deleting iCloud, it is necessary to create a local backup on your computer. So if you lost some data unexpectedly, you still have chance to get backup your important files.Here we would like to introduce a professional iPhone backup software named AOMEI MBackupper. With this tool, you could use it to save photos, videos, music, contacts, and messages to computer.

More importantly, it allows you to preview and select your items to backup. For example, when you backup iPhone photos to computer, you can choose whichever pictures you need. If you want to manage and edit your data on your PC, you can transfer your photos, videos, etc to computer with the "Transfer to PC" feature. And It supports the latest iOS 15, so you could use it to back up your latest iPhone or old iPhone.

Click Start Backup

Conclusion

If someone asks "what happens when I delete iCloud backup" the answer is that it would be removed and could not be recovered. You should check whether your photos or messages are inside of that backup copy under the guide of this passage before deleting it.

You could download some iCloud files to computer to make sure never losing them by wrongly deleting iCloud backup. Backup necessary data to computer with AOMEI MBackupper so you could always safely delete your backup because you know what's in it. Besides, it is a good way to transfer photos from iPhone to iPhone without iCloud.

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