All Devices iCloud backup is backing up photos when iCloud photos is enabled

[Morac]

I had iCloud backup enabled on three iOS devices (iPad Air 2, iPad Pro 11 and iPhone 7 Plus). All are on iOS 13.4.1. They all have iCloud backup and iCloud Photos (about 38.4 GB in size) enabled and until today there was text in the manage iCloud storage backups that said the photo library wasn’t being backed up because iCloud photos was enabled and the photos were stored there.

While trying to debug an issue today, I signed out of iCloud on all my iOS devices and signed back in. Things appeared to be working normally (besides losing around 380 iCloud Keychain passwords), but when I checked my iCloud backups a few hours later I saw that my iPhone backup ballooned from 5 GB to about 42 GB. When I checked I saw the photo library was there and toggled on. It was using around 37 GB. I checked my other two devices and they also had photo library listed and enabled. I toggled it off on all three devices. I then turned off iCloud backup on all three and enabled it, but still photo library was listed as being backed up. I tried toggling iCloud photos off and on, same thing. I tried restarting, same thing.

Basically nothing I did would get iOS to realize it shouldn’t be trying to backup my photo library. The only option was to manually toggle backing the photo library off. Toggling iCloud off and on basically broke this. Now I set my iPad Pro 11 up in December 2019 (iPadOS 13.2 I think) and it was working correctly there.

Anyone having a similar issue?

 

[zorinlynx]

>While trying to debug an issue today, I signed out of iCloud on all my iOS devices and signed back in.

The lesson to be learned here is DON'T DO THIS. You don't ever have to sign out of iCloud and sign back in to fix issues. Doing this forces your entire iCloud Photo Library to resync (among other things) and until that is done and verified the system will keep backing up your photo library to make sure you have a continuous backup through the whole procedure.

I've never seen anyone gain anything from signing out of iCloud and back in other than additional problems. It's a bad idea all around and it can take days for everything to get resynchronized and working properly.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

When you signed out of iCloud and then back in, iCloud began to re-sync the photos. Until they have fully re-synced, the photos that have not yet been re-synced will be part of your iCloud backup (the philosophy is, "If it's not yet in the cloud, it needs to be part of the backup").

You can see that Photos are re-syncing by going into the Photos app, tapping Photos in the lower left, then scrolling to the bottom of the Photos display. It'll show current syncing status ("Uploading XXXXX photos," "Updated Just Now," etc.)

 

[Morac]

When you signed out of iCloud and then back in, iCloud began to re-sync the photos. Until they have fully re-synced, the photos that have not yet been re-synced will be part of your iCloud backup (the philosophy is, "If it's not yet in the cloud, it needs to be part of the backup").

You can see that Photos are re-syncing by going into the Photos app, tapping Photos in the lower left, then scrolling to the bottom of the Photos display. It'll show current syncing status ("Uploading XXXXX photos," "Updated Just Now," etc.)

Yep. Figured this out the hard way. Why iOS felt the need to add my entire photo library to my backup though is beyond me since it was already “backed up”.

On a side note this didn’t even fix the problem I was trying to fix. The only thing it resulted in doing was wiping out the vast majority of my iCloud Keychain passwords. I didn’t use that and it wiped out one that I haven’t been able to delete for about 8 years, so I’m not that broken up about that.