Phone upgrade - phone storage vs cloud

[Gavster]

LIkely getting the iPhone Pro Max, because filming content.

I usually get a phone with large storage, for all the video that I'm filming. However, Apple obvs charge lots of unnecessary extra dollars for 512gb or 1tb versions.

At the same time, I pay for 2TB icloud, which is where my phone's videos/photos autmatically go to anyway.

What I'm thinking is that there's no point getting a phone with large storage capacity AND having large icloud. It would be better value to get the 128gb iPhone and make sure I've got 5G, plenty of data and good signal coverage to access older media on the phone.

I mean, that's the whole point of cloud storage, right?

[Jobbo]

Depends how much you film when out of signal range, I guess. And how quickly it uploads; what happens when you fill your storage? Does the new stuff just push the old stuff to cloud only?

[DeskJockey]

How much space is being consumed by apps, O/S, etc.? What's the usable space left on a 128gb model?

[Mito Man]

That's what I've been doing for many years now as Apple prices for extra memory are a joke. The way it works is that it generally always leaves a few GB free on the phone so you can film and it will upload as soon as you are connected to wifi. You can change the settings so it uploads on mobile data. Recent photos and videos are stored on the phone too so it's instant. Anything older is on iCloud - photos are heavily compressed so look blurry until downloaded but that's pretty instant. Videos though can take a few seconds.

The only thing I'm unsure about in your case where you may film many gigs worth of video in a day is how well it would work as you might find you're constantly having to download videos from the same day from iCloud and the constant pauses may get annoying.

[Jobbo]

iOS takes up just under 10GB and System Data just over 13GB on my iPhone. So you’d expect at least 100GB usable.

Having said that, I have a 512GB model which was cheaper than a 256GB; shop around and there are always better discounts on the larger storage devices because they don’t sell as fast.

[Mito Man]

I’ve just checked and I have 862gb on my iCloud now so that will probably be over 1tb by the end of the year.

[Gavster]

D'oh, I hadn't considered actually looking at my current storage data!

My phone is only storing 4GB from the photos app, which means 99% of my photos and videos are already in the cloud...

My (256GB) phone also has 40GB of space, so it's clearly relying heavily on iCloud for storage. That's basically sold it, there's no point getting a larger phone, in fact, I could possibly downgrade to 128GB.

Also, TikTok is using 44GB of space on my phone I need to check what's going on there.

Between iCloud and BackBlaze I have everything single part of my digital life backed up to the cloud at least once.

[Gavster]

FML, for some reason I also had 60GB of podcasts on my phone that will be a hangup from when I was travelling the world and had unpredictable internet access.

[Gavster]

Updated lots of settings and cleared out my phone, I now have 160GB of space

[DeskJockey]

Issue sorted then. Why upgrade at all?

Edit: you said in the first post. Ignore me.

[Gavster]

Thanks for the prompts everyone, you kicked-started the mental process needed to solve my conundrum!

[Simon]

If you were going to get an iPhone Pro because 'vireping' then the only difference is Pro Res video and I wouldn't want to upload that to the cloud on anything other than an extremely fast internet connection. Patchy 5G wouldn't cut it.

[simon_g]

I only went up to 256 because it lets me dump my music library on there (rather than pay for Spotify etc) and have headroom for other stuff. For things like photos it's easier to just let icloud offload it.

If you're shooting 4k video then it comes down to settings and how much you're going to have on there before you transfer it off for editing. 4k prores 30fps needs at least a 256gb phone, or else it limits you to 1080p. That stuff is 6GB/min.

[JonMad]

Between iCloud and BackBlaze I have everything single part of my digital life backed up to the cloud at least once.

Does BackBlaze back up mapped NAS drives? I tend to copy everything to a local NAS drive, so being able to back that up to cloud would be handy.

[Gavster]

I only went up to 256 because it lets me dump my music library on there (rather than pay for Spotify etc) and have headroom for other stuff. For things like photos it's easier to just let icloud offload it.

If you're shooting 4k video then it comes down to settings and how much you're going to have on there before you transfer it off for editing. 4k prores 30fps needs at least a 256gb phone, or else it limits you to 1080p. That stuff is 6GB/min.

Good point. TBH I hadn't looked into Prores, however, I want to future-proof as much as possible because this phone needs to last 2+ years. Might be a reason to get at least 256GB.

[Gavster]

Between iCloud and BackBlaze I have everything single part of my digital life backed up to the cloud at least once.

Does BackBlaze back up mapped NAS drives? I tend to copy everything to a local NAS drive, so being able to back that up to cloud would be handy.

Doesn't seem to allow NAS backup due to being easy to abuse. I use it to backup my external drives as it has no upper storage limit, so I can keep my 3x lacie drives backed up in the cloud.

[JonMad]

Thanks, my 'NAS' is just a couple of USB drives attached to a Pi, so I could plug them in locally on a Mac now and again for backing up.

[IanF]

If buying a 512/1TB phone enables you to keep using it for one additional year then surely it justifies the extra initial cost?..

[Gavster]

Thanks, my 'NAS' is just a couple of USB drives attached to a Pi, so I could plug them in locally on a Mac now and again for backing up.

That would work. The only slight pain is that you have to plug in any backed-up drives at least once a month. BackBlaze sends a reminder if a drive has been missing for a while, if you leave it too long (over 28 days IIRC) then they'll delete the backed up version completely. I keep my drives next to my desktop computer so it's easy to quickly plug them in.

I sleep well at night knowing that if my entire house burned down, I could pop to the Apple store to buy a computer and some HDDs, and have every part of my digital life reinstated as quickly as my internet connection will allow

[JonMad]

Good to know, cheers.