Explain iphone storage/icloud to me!

[cakedup]

DS has an iphone 5c. He kept getting an error message telling him he had insufficient storage. So I had a quick google and fiddle with his phone no I don't know what I was doing really changed a setting on the icloud bit and it seems to have freed up some storage.

So, is icloud like a website that stores all your stuff, a bit like Dropbox? But you can just access it on your phone without having to visit a different site? Or have I completely got the wrong end of the stick.

As he likes to takes videos which obviously takes up a lot of space (you see, I am tech enough to know that ) I was going to see if I could buy a memory/storage card to put in his phone. Can you do that for iphone?

Also, does it sound right that he should be running out of space and having to use icloud anyway? He only has a few 3 minute videos on there, plus not that many photos. He has a few apps: Pokemon Go, Minecraft, My Singing Monsters and Clash Royale.

Is the 5c an 8GB one, if so the Operating System is probably taking up most of the memory, if it is a 32 GB one then there would be another reason, I suspect it is an 8GB one though, they were quite common to buy. You can' t buy memory cards for them, when buying an iPhone you have to guess how much storage you may need then pay extra for a bigger one. So can be very expensive.

I use iCloud but am not fully sure how it all works, I use it mainly to share stuff across my iPhone, iPad and MacBook. I did learn my lesson though about storage on them from my old 16GB 4s and bought the higher storage iPhone and iPad as the OS take up so much space.

Watching this thread
I have IPhone and iPad and the storage has ran out and am paying Apple for storage monthly. 50gb storage
It's really annoying me.
Pls what's the best way to optimise storage ?

Thanks for replies, I've just had a look and he only has 5gb storage which I guess is pretty low. It's only 79p a month to increase it to 50gb so hopefully that will solve the issue.

when buying an iPhone you have to guess how much storage you may need then pay extra for a bigger one. It's for reasons like this that I really dislike iphones.

Is it the free 5gb iCloud storage that is full then, sorry I thought you meant the phone storage.
I pay the 79p a month for the iCloud because although I have a 64GB phone with quite a bit of free space on it, I use iCloud to share my documents and photos with my other devices. The apps are on the phone storage though not iCloud, music is also on the phone storage.

I did mean the phone storage....have I just bought iCloud storage instead then?! As soon as I activated the 79p a month extra storage we were able to download an app that we were unable to before, so I presume it was the phone storage.

On the settings in storage is two parts, one is storage which is phone storage which will tell you what is on the phone and how much is free and the other is iCloud storage but only certain things can go into iCloud. You probably freed up a bit of space by putting some photos in iCloud which now has more space

It is all do complicated isn't it, I'm still sure I don't use iCloud to its full capabilities

The phone's storage is the "hard disc" it has built into the phone to store things like your apps, music and photos. It's always wise with an iPhone to buy the top or middle amount of this as you can't change it later.

ICloud is just Apple's name for their servers - big computers with a lot of storage capacity running, as someone said, like Dropbox to store various things for you safely - so that if you lose your phone, they can be restored from the iCloud servers. It is also used to keep things in sync between several devices - I have a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone and they all have the latest version of my contacts and calendar (eventually).

You need to pay for enough iCloud storage for what you want to back up - it's very unlikely to be more than the size of your phone.

If you're struggling with a small capacity iPhone, you'll have to delete some things from it. Go to settings and search for Storage and iCloud usage, and then tap "Manage storage" - you'll get to a screen that shows you what's using what that will help you prioritise what to delete.

I have a 64gb iPhone 6 which i have used about 34gb. My iPhone itself has all the apps and their data which is what chews up the phone allowance, but it's actually still got about 50% free on the device. I'm in the annoying place where I use more than 32gb but don't need the extra 32. I need a 40gb phone :(.

I'm currently using 38gb of the extra 50gb cloud storage. I've got around 20gb of videos and photos which are automatically uploaded to the cloud. My cloud storage also holds all my back ups. My last back up which is including contacts, apps and their data is 13gb. You don't have to back your apps up, and you can choose which ones you do to help save space, but if you don't back up and you lose the phone/it gets reset, you won't get the info in that app back.

My iPhone itself has all the apps and their data which is what chews up the phone allowance, but it's actually still got about 50% free on the device.

It's entirely possible, and most likely, with an 8gb phone that he is going to need more space. Videos, even short ones are bigger in size than you think.

One way you can free up phone space is to delete apps like MN, FB and Whatsapp etc which will remove some of the data they hold and then reinstall them. With whatsapp it removes conversations, documents and pics though and you won't get them back (unless you back them up but then deleting is pointless). Apps store data.

Sorry, didn't realised more posts had been added to this thread and they are very helpful, thank you!

So it seems we are stuck with this low storage amount for a while, it's crap because he can't take any photos at the moment which he needs to because he is dyslexic and is allowed to take photos of the homework instructions at school.

Wombatron when you say your videos/photos are automatically uploaded to icloud, doesn't that mean you can't view them on your phone though? Unless you log into icloud everytime or is that easy to do? Great tip about deleting apps and reinstalling though, because he is on Whatsapp and him and his friends went through a stage of sending loads of Pokemon pics to each other, so maybe that took up a lot of space.