iPhone backup takes too much space
I created an account just to answer this question. I ran into this issue myself months ago and was unable to find an answer. The short of it is, Apple is backing up things even if you have them disabled. In my case, Messages was completely disabled from iCloud backup. In fact, almost everything was but my initial backups kept saying 4.4GB or so. I looked at my storage and noticed the closest to that were my Messages. So as a test I deleted a top conversation that was over 1GB and when I recalculated my iCloud backups, sure enough it dropped by a gig.
So great job to Apple backing up something I explicitly disabled. Thankfully I resolved this issue on my own doing testing. I hope this helps others.
To figure out what exactly gets backed up (or what iOS wants to backup):
- Open Settings
- Tap on your AppleID settings at the top
- Tap on "iCloud"
- Tap on "Manage Storage" (the option directly beneath the colored bar showing storage use)
- Tap on "Backups"
- Select your device
This gives you a list of all things iOS wants to backup, including their size. It also gives you the option to enable/disable which application data gets backed up.
Like Matthew Greenwell I found that the majority of my backup was actually taken up by my messages. Even though messages was disabled under "Apps Using iCloud" this was still happening and my backup size was ~4.8GB. The fix for me was to actually enable "Messages" under "Apps Using iCloud", then promptly disable it again. Next I had to go into "Manage Storage" select "Messages" and then click "Delete & Disable." This tricked iCloud into recognizing the actual size of my backup which is now down around 180MB!
Seems like this is a bug in the iCloud management code. Anyway, hope this helps someone else.
As seen from the photos, your large backup was 5.22 GB which is a significant amount. I see you have disabled some options, so the backup sie is now 188.4 MB.
Now you have two options:
Buy more storage
If you want to keep your old backup you need to buy more storage to backup again. To buy more storage click the Upgrade button.
Delete old backups
To free up space you can delete your old large backups. On the iCloud storage screen, go to Manage Storage and then Backups. Here you can delete Backups for a specific device.
To fix the large backup issue:
Delete all backups, log out of iCloud, log back in and do a fresh backup. That always works.
(Source)