With the insane rise in prices of internal device storage, whether it is a hard disk drive (HDD) or an electronic drive (SSD), many have turned to cloud storage as a solution to save their files and digital data.
The problem is that cloud storage can cost you money if you exceed the free limit, and worse still, you might use up your storage space without realizing it. Even if you're careful, you might be surprised to find your cloud storage has run out for no apparent reason.
On Android phones, the system links device backups to your Google account and gives you only 15GB of free storage. This space is shared across all the Google services you use, such as Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos. This means that any photo you upload or any backup you make of your phone will use this same amount of space. If you exceed this limit, you'll have to pay for additional storage, and the longer you neglect to clean up your files, the higher the cost will be.
Even worse, some apps, such as WhatsApp, back up their media to Drive, while Google Photos copies the same files again, meaning that the same photos and videos are stored twice in two different places, consuming twice the space without us noticing.
So, before you let backups run automatically, check the folders that Google Photos is copying, and stop copying files that contain media from WhatsApp, Telegram or other apps, then delete duplicate files from Google Photos after stopping backups.
You can also free up extra space by cleaning up backups of useless apps. In your phone's Google settings, you'll find a list of apps that automatically back up their data to cloud storage. You might be surprised to find that some apps, or even icon packs, are backing up irrelevant data. You can easily disable backups for these apps, as you likely won't need to restore their settings when switching to a new phone. In fact, it might be better to set them up from scratch to avoid any problems that could arise from transferring old data.
In short, with a simple review of your backup settings and getting rid of duplicate and unnecessary files, you can recover gigabytes of cloud space and avoid paying extra money unnecessarily.
