iCloud iPhone Backup Size

nuclearsunset wrote:

How is the backup for my iphone 148.3 GB yet when I check iphone usage I'm only at 70GB of 256 GB.

I could see if photos were a part of that but they must be primarily on the cloud as iphone usage only shows 9GB whereas the iCloud storage breakdown shows photos are 124.4 GB so they are separate anyways.. If they are somehow included in the backup then the 124.4GB of cloud photos, even if 9GB is on the phone, would bring my backup up to 185.4GB (70GB phone - 9GB photos on phone + 124.4GB icloud photos = 185.4GB total) so that math doesn't work out for me either?

The next largest items after backups and photos is mail and that's only 204Mb so all of the other items should be negligible from what I can tell.

I've had to step up to the next plan (2TB) and was about to offload a bunch of cloud photo storage onto a physical storage device that I have but if my backups are double the size of my phone usage this isn't going to make a difference for long anyway. I'd really like to step back down to the previous tier of 200GB but the sizing isn't making sense to allow me to do this.

Read what is and isn't backed up to the cloud What does iCloud back up? - Apple Support items that are synced to the cloud counts towards icloud storage.