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iPhone Storage Full SNAFU Angers Many Apple Fans

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iPhone Storage Full Will Ruin Your Happy Apple Day

My wife found her iPhone storage full all the time just a few months after getting the iPhone 6 Plus model. She loves the phone, and more specifically she loves taking tons of photos of our baby girl with it. She takes so many pictures that her 16gb storage is full.

Ugh.

I told her that she would regret going with a phone with a fixed amount of internal storage that wasn’t expandable like it is on most Android phones, but she wanted the Apple.

Fellow device nerds and gadget freaks, especially those who, like me, are married…   You can’t win the logic argument with your wife, or anyone who wants a certain thing but doesn’t understand the repercussions of a decision like that.

When the wife encounters the iPhone storage full after deleting apps, that urgency is tripled.

I’m not talking about those who understand these limitations and choose to make the decision anyway. I mean the ones, like my wife, who make the decision and then want someone like me to deal with it, and then fix it to their liking so that they can move on.

Yeah, that’s me.

I get to deal with her iPhone storage full warning in real time.

She’s lucky that I know how to go about this.

One option is to move the photos to a PC or Mac periodically to free up phone storage.

Another option is cloud storage – which basically means storing your photos on some company’s internet connected storage solution.

I researched Cloud storage options, and found that Microsoft had the best one. The problem with Apple’s iCloud is the price. They give you pathetically low free storage then rope you into the high priced plans pretty quickly. Dropbox is similarly lame.

The way that you do this is you create an account through the Microsoft One Drive website. IF you don’t already have an Outlook.com or Hotmail.com account, you can set one up to use.

Once you set that up, you have your login credentials and download the One Drive app to your iPhone. This works on other types of phones too, but small internal storage iPhone users have the largest need.

Once you install the app and login with your account ID, you tell the app to backup your photos – basically tell it that you are going to use that for cloud storage. Hopefully you are on WiFi or have a data plan that can support the initial backup.

Another snafu that you have to worry about it that if you iPhone screen locks, the upload pauses. You’ll need to plug the phone in, run the One Drive app in the foreground, and let it do it’s stuff to get a full backup. Just walk away for a while. If the screen still locks, look in the settings for how to temporarily disable that until the initial backup completes. Once your initial backup is complete, the One Drive apps runs in the background uploading new photos, but iOS can still close it periodically, so make sure that you open in once in a while to keep it running and backing up. In this it is a bit weaker than the Apple app, which I am SURE iOS doesn’t interfere with, but these are the games that large corporations play to protect and grow their bottom line.

You can login to One Drive on the web and check that your photos are uploaded.

Once all of your pictures are backed up, and provided you don’t want to still move them to a local computer as a second backup, you can safely delete them from the phone knowing they’re safe online.

Once your phone fills again, you check your account to make sure everything is up there, and you can delete the local copies again.

This will work until your Once Drive account fills and you have to start buying extra storage, BUT, the prices are WAY better than the iCloud pricing.

Problem solved.

Okay so it’s time for me to rant a bit. This is one of the reasons I would NEVER go to an iPhone. I am perfectly happy on Android with the ability to put these files to my SD card. If my 64GB SD card fills, my current phone can support up to a 128GB card. There are Android phones that don’t have internal SD cards, but I would never get one of those. (Hear me, Google?)

Other than for this annoying issue, my wife gladly smokes the Apple iPhone crack.

I guess it’s the power user ex UNIX administrator and software industry nerd guy within me that DEMANDS flexibility from my gadgets. I couldn’t fit my habits into an iPhone any easier than I can fit my husky body into my petite wife’s clothes… but as with a big guy wanting to cross dress, (I don’t, it’s just a poor metaphor) why would you want to do that?

That is what Apple devotees have opted for in buying these crippled phones.

I have to be honest, I only did the One Drive thing for my wife to get her backed up quickly and because moving the pictures to a computer didn’t work too well. It’s probably my power user desire to copy and delete the source in one operation (hence, move) the files is what caused the problem. Next time I try to back her files up to a computer I will copy and then delete the source files later.

You live and learn.

What I did learn from this is that Apple’s iCloud storage is terribly expensive compared to the Microsoft offering and that if you are an Apple iPhone owner who is looking for an alternative to escape the iPhone storage full issue, you should give the formerly evil Microsoft a look for your cloud storage needs.

So there you have it. Apple wants users crippled by the iPhone storage full warning to get hooked on devices that easily fill their very small internal memory and then rope them into paying exorbitant monthly cloud data storage fees once they see the iPhone storage full error. Follow the money. Competition is good and Microsoft has filled the gap, bumping over DropBox as the other solution.

That’s the summary.

I provided some solutions, and I hope you construe that as value.

Check out some of my other articles on this blog and share them out to your circles.

It’s been nice communicating to you.

Until next time…

 

–Tom Connelly




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