iPhone backup in iTunes is much larger than iPhone storage

[ahmanimen]

Hey all.

Yesterday, I backed up my iPhone Xs (256 gb) to iTunes in hopes of restoring it with the backup before iOS 15 releases. The backup process went by smoothly, albeit slow, but with no problems. However, after attempting to restore the backup to my device, I was hit with an error that said that my iPhone did not have enough storage for the restore. I did some digging and found out that my backup size was 290 gigabytes. That is 35 gb more than my device's max and about 60-70 gb more than what I had even used on my device.

After going through similar threads, I saw a reply that said that the iTunes backup includes all iCloud photos as well. I have the 200 gb iCloud storage plan and I have used it up a while ago, so would that mean that my iTunes backup downloaded all of those photos and videos and added them to my backup? If so, is there a way to delete those photos from the backup? I looked around on the web for different programs that may help with this and I stumbled across a program called "iMazing". My backup was found and I could access my photos but I don't see an option to delete any. I'm trying to reduce the size as much as possible so that I can restore my phone to the state it was in just a few days ago.

Thanks!

 

[Gregzo]

Hello, Greg here from iMazing.

iTunes or the Finder backups do not include iCloud photos, no. Well, they only include iCloud photos which are currently on the device, not the ones which are only iCloud side. The 'not enough space' error is simply a bug iOS side or backup side.

What you can try is to restore the backup with iMazing, and in the restore wizard, use the 'Customised Data' option to restore everything except Photos. Your photos are in iCloud anyway so that should work without any data loss. Please try that, and get in touch at imazing.com/contact if you need help – the rules of this forum explicitly state that it shouldn't be used for customer support! Thanks,

Gregorio