[crazygringo]

If her iCloud backup is 95gb then it only costs $3/mo. for the 200 GB plan [1].

If you're paying $30/mo. for the 6 TB storage plan then that's because you're choosing to store a ton of stuff there. It's certainly not because of your wife's messages. And you're making my point for me -- I do the same! $10/mo for 2 TB. It's great.

Cloud pricing is pretty decently competitive when you compare it to building your own storage with the same reliability, which is going to involve redundant on-site hard drives in a NAS, and an extra off-site backup.

You can also just delete the largest iMessage media files directly from the phone, there's literally a feature for that. Since most people don't really care about saving any of the videos or images after they've been seen, or you can save them individually to your Photos at the time if you do care. I do a mass-delete every year or two.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108047

[shmoogy]

We pay for iCloud regardless because we've crossed the 2tb threshold for our devices and our kids devices backups + photos and videos.

Deleting the iMessage data off the device is not feasible after like ten minutes it was showing me 20 at a time that had small sizes relative to the amount left to delete. Thank you for your attempt at helping though