Why is my iPhone backup so large?

This is the very question that has been bugging me for a few months now. iCould keeps telling me that my backups have failed because I don't have enough space and I have literally turned off every back feature but still have this problem. My backup size is 3.8GB while it should technically be less than 1/2 GB. So what gives? Even the geniuses at the Apple Store were stumped. 

Well, I figured it out. I took a full backup of my iPhone using iTunes. Then I used iBackupBot to view my backup and see if could see what condition my condition was in. Well, if you do the same, you'll see the following file structure:

It's all exactly what it sounds like. 

• The System Files folder has your settings and databases and keychains and so on
• The User App Files folder has all the files for each of your apps
• The other three folders are not so obvious so I dug in and saw this in the "App Group Files" folder:

As you can see, I have sorted by size and for some reason Spark (my email application) is taking up 3.3 GB of space. As it turns out, the iCloud backup really backs up this whole folder and you have no choice over that even if you choose NOT to backup the Spark App.

Well so I dug in one more layer:

As you can clearly see, Spark has a pretty nasty cache file and also saves all your search history. That's pretty ridiculous given that this is taking up valuable iCloud storage. So I deleted the app and my backup went from 3.8GB to 338 MB!!! Victory!!!

If you're having issues with your iCloud file size being too large, Spark might be the culprit. If not, use iBackupBot to figure out what is the biggest space hog in the "App Group Files" folder and then delete the app. 

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