Storage confusion

[griffmeister]

Hi all.

My iPhone has almost reached capacity on storage. I back everything up to icloud. My question is this:

If I manually delete some media files on my phone to free up some space, what the hell happens to my icloud storage? Because when an icloud backup next occurs, it's obviously going to overwrite previous backup and therefore I'll lose my photos?

What's the point in me buying 200gb of icloud a month if I can only use 64gb of storage on a phone?

I'm confused!

 

[winmaciek]

iCloud is meant to sync everything across all devices. So yes, deleting a photo on an iPhone will erase it on the iCloud (and other devices, if any) attached to this account. There a feature though that might help you. You can use “optimize storage” (settings->Photos). This will only keep thumbnails and some recent photos on the device. The rest will be kept in the iCloud and downloaded when needed over wifi or cellular connection.
Keep in mind that having all photos in iCloud only may be risky because if something happens it may be harder or impossible to recover such photos. You may want to backup them, if they’re important to you, in another place as well. I personally have optimized storage on my iPhone and I keep all of them locally on my Mac (with Time Machine on). I think that for most people it’d be a both reasonable and affordable option.