Apple say "Just trust us and pay"...

Once upon a time, I bought an iPhone.   And over the years, as batteries have lost their oomph, devices have got absurdly more powerful and have got software/services have got more demanding, I've bought a handful of other Apple products -- maybe half a dozen in all.

I obviously had to have an account with Apple, and came with 5 GBytes of iCloud storage -- storage in the cloud that the various devices could use to share/exchange data.  They could (and possibly would be default) also try to back themselves up there.  Since 5GBytes was too small to back up anything much, I've always done my own backups for the things that matter, and don't keep anything unique on the others....

Yesterday, my phone alerted me to the fact that my iCloud storage was almost full -- 4.4GBytes out of 5.  "That's odd", I thought, "What is that 4.4 GBytes?".

And so far the answer is "I can't find out".

If I go to look at my iCloud Drive, I see different things everywhere I look (iPhone, iPad, Mac or iCloud.com) -- slightly different groupings or presentations of information.  They all offer me warnings saying I have 568MBytes left.  And invite me to pay for more.  Oh, and the Help pages that nominally tell me how to manage my storage also invite me to pay for more.

Somewhere -- my phone I think -- I saw something that said I have 400 MByte of WhatsApp chats (people keep sending me pictures, so MAYBE) and a comparable amount of Health app data.  And then 3.5 GBytes of "Documents and Data".  But when I try to explore the "Documents and Data", I find a bunch of directories ("Folders") which each say how much data is being used by the files in them, but excluding sub-directories.  And having spent over an hour looking in scores of directories, I don't think I've seen total more than a couple of hundred MBytes. 

So the choices Apple is presenting me with are to delete everything (yes, that is an option) without knowing what I am deleting; risk some synchronisation somewhere failing when the space runs out; or assume that the space is currently full of "good stuff", even though I have no idea what it is, and

and pay for more.

WTF!