I downgraded my iCloud storage today. Just like that. It had been on my mind for a while now, today I snapped. When I got this phone less than two years ago, it had nothing on it. Then I started taking photos, sending texts… obviously, I never stopped doing that, which is why we are here today — some 143 GB worth of stuff I now need to get rid of. I have no clue what most of it is about — is it more videos or photos or something else? is it important? do I need it? Will my life be worse without it? I don’t know, but I suppose I felt pressured enough to spend money, every month, just to hold on to all of it. Was it FOMO, or laziness, or both?

While I have pressed the buttons on the downgrade, this life-altering change comes into effect only after a week — incredible design-thinking from the folks at Apple. Certainly, they knew most people would surrender to the vastness of their digital trash and resentfully continue paying for storage. I am determined not to be one of those people. I am a “high-agency person”, how can I be enslaved to such technological phony?

But to get to that downgraded storage, I’ll need to make massive cuts. So yeah, there is a lot to delete, purge, or transfer elsewhere. I have to truncate all 143 GB of trash into a hopefully more meaningful 5 GB bundle. That way, I can finally stop paying for cloud storage — the silliest expense in my life right now, if you ask me. And that’s saying something, considering my last purchase was a plush pillow.

Remember when the internet first came around? We thought it would be so simple. “Everything just stays on the cloud,” they said, “so you’ll always have access to it.” Whatever happened to that promise? Not so simple, after all, is it? Everything does stay on the “cloud”, yes, but the “cloud” is actually made up of ginormous stuff — servers and data-centers and whatnot — massive machines that occupy real space all over the world and cost companies tonnes of money that we, the consumers, have to naturally pay a price for. The advantage, of course, is that I no longer need to buy heavy CD/floppy disk holders or pen drives or hard drives to store my data (trash), but they were never expensive to begin with. A couple hundred rupees, back in the day? I now pay that every month for (cloud) storage I can’t even see. Sure, I have instant “access” to everything, but who is going to want to “access” 143GB of media? You think I wake up every day and think to myself, “thank you god, today just like yesterday I shall access the many photos and videos that would have never existed if I hadn’t paid for all the cloud storage“?

I used to think that this is at least environmentally better than physical storage, but I guess that may not be true either. Cloud storage is said to be leaving a pretty big carbon footprint — 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions as per one defensible study, another piece by a group of alumni from Stanford cites data that seems to prove that cloud storage is actually worse for the environment than hard storage. Wait, why did we just presume cloud-everything would be cleaner? Just because we can’t see the trash doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Speaking of trash, this process of decluttering my digital storage does bear some parallels to the morning ritual of emptying the trash-can, but somehow the entire premise of cloud storage feels more… Machiavellian.

Every morning, we take out our trash can, someone collects the old bag, we line the bin with a fresh one, and the cycle repeats itself — day in, day out. In the digital world, though, we make the trash, we keep it, and we have to dispose of it ourselves. Because if we don’t (like I didn’t all this while), the trash lingers and accumulates — just like real trash (minus the stink) —until it becomes a mound so colossal that even the thought of sifting through it feels paralysing. And when that happens, it feels easier to keep paying money just to avoid dealing with it.

It’s one of the cool things money can buy — the luxury to procrastinate. Clearly, the inventors of cloud storage had figured this out.

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I went through the storage settings on my phone to get a sense of the work that lies ahead to make this downgrade happen. Apparently, I have 113 GB of just “backups.” Backups of what? I have no idea. What use could I possibly have for so much backup? When was a backup ever truly necessary? When have I ever paused and thought, “Oh wait, let me find that backup ASAP.” That’s right — never. Besides, if I buy a new phone, isn’t the clean, empty storage space supposed to be part of its charm? Restoring 113 GB of “backups” would immediately taint the beauty of its emptiness. Then the mound of digital trash would just follow me, haunting my procrastinating self on the new phone… forever.

Backup is a strange functionality to be paying real money for. It’s like saying to the phones and apps, “Hey, I want to collect a ton of trash and be able to lug it around wherever I go, all my life, and I will pay you good money to let me be this stupid.” That’s it. No more of this low-agency consumer behaviour.
<Delete>
There you go — gone with a single click. Backups I will not miss because I don’t even know what was in them.

Up next: photos. When I saw that I have 28 GB of photos, I was surprised. How did I end up with 113 GB of “backups” but only 28 GB of photos? Then I remembered: at one point, I had taken so many photos that a single cloud storage app couldn’t keep up. I had to start paying for Google Photos on top of iCloud. Now, I have two photo storage apps and not enough good photos.

The memories are nice, and the travel throwbacks are fun to revisit, but let’s be real — there are more blurry shots, screenshots, random WhatsApp forwards, and ugly everyday things than there are pictures of me traveling, hiking, dancing, or doing anything remotely cool.

My parents managed to fit our entire childhood into a few photo albums, but here I am, paying monthly rent for two dozen identical selfies, the pretentious vase on my table, and artsy-but-not-really photos of the tree in front of my house. Why?

No more. This absurdity stops now.
<Delete>
There you go — no more paying for additional photo storage in iCloud. (There’s still the matter of the Google Photos subscription, but hey, one battle at a time.)

I really underestimated how much work this would be. It’s so much more involved than emptying the trash can — with real trash, at least you know you cannot procrastinate forever, otherwise, little insect friends will start visiting your home and that won’t be pretty. With digital trash, there is no such thing. Hey, how about an app that will send creepy-crawlies on your screen if you let your storage get too stuffed? Never mind.

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So, let’s get this straight. This whole digital storage thing is i) expensive, ii) bad for the environment, iii) creates a mountain of clutter on our devices that’s so overwhelming it feels paralysing to even look at it. And yet, it’s somehow better than physical storage because, what, the cloud is newer and therefore cooler? Because technology? Because innovation?

Sigh. I know this is my area of work, and I love it, but man… some days, I just feel like the technology industry is so… bonkers.

Why is storage space never enough, though? I remember hearing this in a Netflix documentary ages ago—though I can’t recall which one, since there are so many about minimalism these days. It talked about how we buy things to fill up our storage, then spend money on more storage, only to fill that up with even more stuff… and so the cycle of modern life continues. I see it now. I started with nothing on this phone, then quickly filled up all 5 GB of free space. Eventually, I ended up paying to upgrade my storage — twice — just to make room for more digital photos, videos, backups… the works.

This has got to stop. I could blame tech companies all day, but as someone who works in tech, I get it — they have to offer what people want, even if what people want was created by the same tech companies. Customers first, right?

Imagine if Apple said, “Hey, Sugandha, we care about you. This is an intervention. We think you have a problem because you shouldn’t have this much stuff on your phone. We think you have a problem because you really shouldn’t have this much stuff on your phone. Life is about smelling the flowers and watching them sunsets. So, we won’t let you add anything more to your device or your cloud, which, by the way, cost you a bomb.” My complaint then would be that they have no boundaries.

Anyway, that should be all. I’ll go back to downgrading my iPhone storage. Now that I’m finally doing this, it feels silly to have procrastinated for so long. Someone could’ve really used the money I spent storing all this stuff I never needed.

By the way, I’m deleting most of it pretty quickly because, deep down, I know it doesn’t matter. I always knew it. I guess I just held on to it “just in case.” Isn’t that what we do? “Just in case” everything. All I had to do was stop and ask myself — will I really need this picture, this video, this backup, this screenshot, this document, will they add value to my life? But nope, far be it from me — the consumer of the modern digital age — to think.

It’s funny how we fill up our coffers with documents, pictures, videos… “memories,” as we call them — memories of a past we didn’t care about when it was the present. It’s funny how all we talk about is living in the present, yet it’s the backups of the past that take up most of the space in our lives. Nothing. It’s funny, is all.

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