New Phone

Question

My husband used my iCloud account before I had an iPhone. Now that I have one, I am still finding information from when my husband used the account. I try to backup my iCloud account and it says I do not have enough space, but I know I still 3.9GB left. I log on to the iCloud website and I can not find any record of my phone or my husband's phone on the iCloud website. I want to clear everything he had on the phone prior to me using it starting in December. Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

Done properly, you won't lose anything.  You would not be able to migrate your existing iCloud email account to the new account, but you could still use it for email as a secondary account on your phone if you want to.
You would need a new Apple ID to create the new account, which requires a verifiable email account to set up.  You can easily get a free Gmail address for this purpose.  You can create a new Apple ID by going here.
To migrate your data to a new account, you start by saving any photo stream photos that you want to keep to your camera roll (unless already there) by opening your my photo stream album, tapping Select, tapping the photos, tap the share icon (box with upward facing arrow), then tapping Save to Camera Roll.  This is necessary because photo stream photos cannot be moved to another account and will be deleted from your phone when you delete the existing account.
If you are syncing notes with iCloud that you want to keep, you'll need to open each of your notes and email them to yourself so you can later copy and paste the text into new notes created in your new account.  Notes is the other data set that cannot be migrated to a new account, and therefore must be recreated.
Then go to Settings>iCloud, tap Delete Account, provide the password to turn off Find My iPhone and choose Keep on My iDevice when prompted.  Then sign back in with a different Apple ID to create your new account and choose Merge to upload your data.  When you turn on Mail you will be asked to choose a new iCloud email account if you want to use iCloud for email.  If you want to continue to use the email account from your current iCloud account, you can add it to your phone by going to Settings>Mail,Contacts,Calendars>Add Account>iCloud, signing in with your existing iCloud account ID and turning Mail on.
Ringtones and Music are not effected by this change.  You can continue to use your current ID for your iTunes purchases; it does not need to be the same as your iCloud ID.  Of course, if you want to rid yourself of your husband's purchased list, you could change your iTunes ID as well.  I wouldn't recommend this, however, as then you would be managing two IDs for your purchased media.  This is because all existing purchases will remain tied to your existing iTunes ID and future purchases will be tied to your new ID.