Your iCloud is full because it’s still backing up iPhones you no longer own
I’ve owned several iPhones over the last decade, even though I don’t upgrade every year. Every time I switch, I assume the retired phone quietly exits my digital life. It doesn’t. Poking around my iCloud storage last month to find what was hogging space, I turned up two backups I’d completely forgotten: an iPhone 8 and an iPhone 11. Both phones were long gone. Neither had powered on in years, yet each still sat on gigabytes of my account. If your storage keeps creeping toward full for no clear reason, stale device backups are often the cause. They don’t delete themselves when you sell or trade in a phone. Here’s how to find them and clear them out. Why old backups linger in your account Every device you’ve signed into gets its own backup Credit: Brady Snyder / MakeUseOf Turn on iCloud Backup during setup, and your iPhone starts saving a nightly snapshot of itself: app data, settings, your Home screen layout, messages, and the rest. That snapshot belongs to the device, though, not to your …
