Cleaning an iPad to gain space

kah22

I need to gain space on an old iPad I have, it really only has a 16 GB capacity and it is really only used for messing around with and I have no need of a new one.

There is ample room left on my iPhone, it’s 128 GB. If I delete material of the iPad will it automatically be deleted from the iPhone

Can I do a factory reset or would that wipe everything even material I have on the iPhone.

Any advice and as always a big 👍

Kevin

Neil_Jones

What you mean is the iPhone and the iPad are signed into the same Apple ID?

So if you delete that apple ID from the iPad then it can't affect it on the iPhone.

But of course you do have backups just in case away from the Apple devices... don't you?

kah22

Yes the iPad and the iPhone are signed into the same account

Given I’ve removed the Apple ID from the iPad I can then do a factory reset (everything I need is backed, I even bought more space!) and I basically have a clean iPad ?

What then if I let the iPad sign into the same account again, for it is easier doing emails and contacting the wonderful members of moneysavingexpert 🤓 and using the Internet via the iPad rather than the iPhone, will all the material I wiped via a factory reset come flooding back?

Trying to understand what happens if I do X, Y, or. Z before I do anything

Kevin

Neil_Jones

Because of the cloud feature if you sign back into it all the data will come back down again.

If that's not what you want you can either not bother signing into an Apple ID at all (you'd forego app updates, the store and the cloud features) or create a new one.

randm

kah22 wrote: »

I need to gain space on an old iPad I have, it really only has a 16 GB capacity and it is really only used for messing around with and I have no need of a new one.

There is ample room left on my iPhone, it’s 128 GB. If I delete material of the iPad will it automatically be deleted from the iPhone

Can I do a factory reset or would that wipe everything even material I have on the iPhone.

Any advice and as always a big 👍

Kevin

i have an old ipad 4. i found a brilliant tip from an old mac world, it may not work for everyone but it seems apple somehow keeps stuff on your ipad using up space. so note how much space is left, go to itunes and opt to rent a big movie, you won't pay anything as you are not actually going to rent, choose something like the complete lord of the rings trilogy. it will do a search and inform you that there is not enough storage on your ipad and to go and free up some space. if you then go back to your storage and see how much is left it will have changed to a higher amount. i actually gained 4gb.i now do this periodically. let me know if it works for you.

coffeehound

Is it possible to have iCloud storage disabled on one device but not on the other? There seem to be various options to switch off icloud drive and App storage under settings>iCloud.

Undervalued

Most Apple apps don't let you easily delete the data they accumulate. If you look in Settings > Storage you will see what size each app has grown to.

So the easy answer with apps like Twitter, online newspapers etc is to delete them periodically then reinstall. Generally they only re-download the most recent data so you get quite a space saving (unless you start scrolling back months in Twitter say)!

The Apple Mail app is also particularly bad in this respect and may have months or years of emails stored on your iPad. Deleting that without clearing the emails off your server is a little more complex but it can be done if it is one of the big space hogs on your iPad.

It is also worth looking closely at apps like iPlayer, All 4 etc as there is generally an option to download programs to watch offline. It is easy (on some) to do that by mistake. I have also know All4 to get confused and hog a lot of space.

kah22

randm wrote: »

i have an old ipad 4. i found a brilliant tip from an old mac world, it may not work for everyone but it seems apple somehow keeps stuff on your ipad using up space. so note how much space is left, go to itunes and opt to rent a big movie, you won't pay anything as you are not actually going to rent, choose something like the complete lord of the rings trilogy. it will do a search and inform you that there is not enough storage on your ipad and to go and free up some space. if you then go back to your storage and see how much is left it will have changed to a higher amount. i actually gained 4gb.i now do this periodically. let me know if it works for you.

Unfortunately not 😥. I tried it on a few occasions, shut the iPad down and opened it up again, but it just told me I hadn’t enough and go to apps to free up space

I had already off loaded a number of apps and deleted a few more and now I have 1.7GB free

randm

you don't need to shut down the ipad, if you have a look at how much space there is now, then try to rent a movie, when it tells you that there is not enough space and to go free some up, go back to where it says how much space you have, shut the settings and then reopen, and looking again the space free should have increased. hopefully.:D
Apologies if that is what you have done, because i am not sure if i am reading your reply correctly.:o