Anyone good at this stuff ? (daft question, I agree)

My wife has a laptop with a 250ish SSD inside and that’s almost totally full.
Nearly 60G of that is in users – MrsPants – appdata – roaming – apple – mobilesync – backup
another 50G is in users – MrsPants – pictures – icloudphotos

I don’t do apple but she tells me that she has her phone backed up to icloud
The bit of reading I’ve done suggests to me that the stuff on her SSD is likely just duplication of that and probably could be dumped. She got rid of the older backup of a previous phone but that removed only about 5G so we need more space

… however, I don’t want to be killed in my sleep so I need to KNOW that we can get rid of this shit and rely on the icloud

(the other thing is, are the 60G in the backup totally different content to the 50G in icloudphotos or again are we duplicating three times over)

Any tips/warnings welcomed thanks !

If the iPhone is only 64GB then it’s likely duplicate.

Quick google suggests these are backups from physically connecting the phone to the computer – totally unnecessary these days so presumably old backups? You can check the date of them and manage/delete from iTunes I think. As long as you can verify you have an up-to-date iCloud backup you’ll be fine.

Presumably you’re ALSO backing up the laptop to an external drive or cloud service? If not, you should be obviously. Then you’ll have a fallback anyway but I really don’t think those files are needed.

Look in iTunes, preferences, devices.
You can delete the backups there and turn off the local backup settings

Thanks all – we know that she can delete it, just want to be sure that it’s mirrored “exactly” by what’s on the icloud. As far as I can see, there’s no way of identifying what’s in the local (or cloud) backup by seeing names so I’m just a bit scared(y)

Any music which isn’t/hasn’t been bought through Apple will not be backed up to iCloud.

If you want to be sure. Back the phone up to the laptop and to the cloud. Wipe it and restore from the cloud and see what you have. You can then wipe again and restore from the local copy which you’re certain has everything. Be sure to check your music and videos.

Does she have a iCloud plan? The free iCloud storage is only 5GB so depending on how many photos she has unlikely that everything has been stored fully to the cloud?

If she has one of the plans (50GB or 200BB etc…) then yes the iCloud backup should contain a full backup of the photos she has on her phone at the moment.

I believe the phone should do auto backups when the phone is on charge and connected to WiFi. You can also trigger a manual backup through the settings to double check.

Caveat: I know nothing about iDevices.

Has she ever deleted down anything on her phone? If not you could just bin the bloody lot and then do a new fresh backup to recreate it.

If you want to be belt-and-braces you can get a USB pendrive the size of that SSD for sub-£30 and copy the lot over first.

Here.

Nice.

Better yet,

Buy a bigger SSD and a SATA – USB cable, clone it, swap, then delete. Then you’ve got your backup device and more space in the lapdog.

£100 for a 1TB Evo:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-samsung-860-evo-25-3d-ssd-sata-iii-6gb-s-mjx-mlc-3d-v-nand-1gb-cache-read-550mb-s-write-520mb-s

(Assuming you’re correct that it’s an SSD and not an M.2 drive.)

Assuming her phone is set up correctly to back up to iCloud she doesn’t really need a local copy on the computer. I’ve never used iTunes to back my phone up, I just let it do its thing in the cloud. I do have to pay 79p/month I think for the extra storage.

The iCloud Photos\Downloads folder should be a local copy of all the photos on the phone/on iCloud. This is worth keeping 1. So you have a backup of your photos and 2. Because it’s handy being able to access them on the laptop.

Before deleting everything I’d check the iCloud account is doing its backup correctly (check everything in settings is switched on, especially contacts, messages, WhatsApp etc).

cheers everyone – I’ll show her this & she can see hwat she’s got

Better yet,

Buy a bigger SSD and a SATA – USB cable, clone it, swap, then delete. Then you’ve got your backup device and more space in the lapdog.

I would, and probably will but you know that’s just postponing the next storage crisis (is there a world record for iphone backup space-wastage ?)

This might be of use;
https://www.easeus.com/iphone-data-transfer/best-free-itunes-alternatives.html