Help! "Not enough available space on iPhone X to Restore from backup

[Craiger]

I am going from a 128 GB iPhone 7 plus with iOS 11.2 to a 64GB iPhone X with iOS 11.2. My old phone was only using around 26 GB of data. I checked right before I backed it up. I'm now getting the message in the title when I try to restore from that backup.

Can anyone help?

This is an encrypted iTunes backup btw.

I was thinking maybe it's getting confused by my 80GB iCloud photo library?

 

[Craiger]

Well I figured part of the story out.

My old iPhone was lying about storage. It actually had all 80GB of my photos on the device even though it reported only 26 GB used. I understand the purpose behind this, but it's a bit too misleading.

I'm now restoring my old backup to my wife's phone, I'm going to somehow delete the photos for real then back it up again and restore to my new phone.

Does anyone know how to REALLY delete photos from the device but not from iCloud?

 

[Shirasaki]

You could turn off iCloud photos on one device, do backup, and then restore before turning it back on.