Bloated Device Backup Storage in Google One
I'm losing my mind over here. 3 months ago I went down the rabbit hole of trying to discover why my Device Backup was taking up 6.5gb of storage in my Google One Storage Manager.
From what I gathered, it was bloated due to the amount of photos that were saved in my Google Photos backup as well as on my device. I manually backed all of the photos up to my home server, deleted them from Google Photos (which apparently also deleted them from my Pixel?) and then also deleted all previous device backups... I got the Device Backup down to ~2.5Gb. Fantastic.
Here we are 3 months later and my Device Backup is now 7.11Gb?! I have barely ANY photos (and literally 2 videos totaling 2minutes on my device) and the Device Backup is even greater? What is going on? Does anyone have a solution for this in 2026?