This is for anyone that backs up their iOS/iPadOS devices (especially large capacity ones), to their Mac instead of iCloud backups...
So, I have an M2 Mac mini with the 512 GB SSD and I've been trying to move my users folder because I have like 36 GB left, so, having trouble doing that I did some digging and found out that 356GB of the user folder was taken up by iPhone and iPad backups/system software. How I found this was by going to system settings/general/storage. Here is where it showed me the largest color bar was iOS files, so, you can go down from there and click on the info icon across from iOS files and it will show you all the device backups/system files stored. Some of them were so old I deleted them right there, (it's a permanent delete, no trash can here.), but, the size of them is what concerns me. I'm doing updates now, but once I go through and delete/copy photos I will delete them all and do new backups. So, I realized that I need to trash or copy a lot of my photos that I don't need on my iPhone. (you can copy your photos to your photo library on your Mac, and your photo library can be on a separate drive). I also have an iPad that has a lot of screenshots and also copies of photos from my iPhone I can ditch.
I just spent two days trying to figure out how to free space on my 512 GB SSD, so, this is it.
So, I have an M2 Mac mini with the 512 GB SSD and I've been trying to move my users folder because I have like 36 GB left, so, having trouble doing that I did some digging and found out that 356GB of the user folder was taken up by iPhone and iPad backups/system software. How I found this was by going to system settings/general/storage. Here is where it showed me the largest color bar was iOS files, so, you can go down from there and click on the info icon across from iOS files and it will show you all the device backups/system files stored. Some of them were so old I deleted them right there, (it's a permanent delete, no trash can here.), but, the size of them is what concerns me. I'm doing updates now, but once I go through and delete/copy photos I will delete them all and do new backups. So, I realized that I need to trash or copy a lot of my photos that I don't need on my iPhone. (you can copy your photos to your photo library on your Mac, and your photo library can be on a separate drive). I also have an iPad that has a lot of screenshots and also copies of photos from my iPhone I can ditch.
I just spent two days trying to figure out how to free space on my 512 GB SSD, so, this is it.
