How to Free up Space on Your iPhone or iPad

There is nothing more frustrating than when you get a notification from Apple informing you of the lack of space on your iOS device. There are some quick methods that will easily help your reclaim all of the space on your iPhone or iPad, giving you more room for albums, pictures, and apps. This week, we will teach you how to back up and make the most space on your iPhone or iPad.

Featured Photo: K?rlis Dambr?ns

When you look at what takes up storage on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, there is something called “Other Data”. The other data in your storage space can be classified as Safari bookmarks, texts, old calendar entries, and much more. One way to effectively get rid of this extra junk in your iPhone is to wipe and restore your device. First, make sure to back up your device so that you don’t lose any crucial information before you wipe your device. You can do this by either backing up via…

iCloud Storage

1. Connect your device to a Wi-Fi Network
2. Plug in your iOS Device
3. Go to Settings
4. iCloud Backup (make sure that iCloud Backup is turned on )
5. Tap Back Up Now and wait until the process finishes
6. Make sure that the backup is finished by tapping on Settings
7. iCloud Storage
8. Manage Storage and click your device
9. The Backup should appear in the details with the time and backup size

or Back Up Using iTunes

1. Open up iTunes
2. Connect your device to your computer
3. Save all content that you have downloaded from the iTunes or App Store
4. Click File
5. Devices
6. Transfer Purchases
7. Wait for iTunes to finish transferring your purchases
8. Click on File
9. Devices
10. Back up

• After this is over, you can see if your backup was successful by clicking on:
  1. iTunes
  2. Preferences
  3. Devices

This should have the name of the device with the date and time that iTunes made the backup.

Wipe Your iOS Device

After you have successfully completed the backup of all your important information, it’s time to wipe and restore your iOS device. To start this process goes to:

1. Settings
2. General
3. Reset
4. Erase all contents

After this is done, plug your iPhone back into iTunes and restore (or restore via iCloud). Backing up, wiping, and then restoring erases all cookies, temporary files, and all of the other unnecessary data you don’t need.

If you don’t want to wipe your phone but still clear some space up, then we have other solutions for you as well.

Get Rid of Your Texts

If you aren’t someone who continuously clears out your texts, you might want to consider doing so to free up more space. Your texts may contain pictures, videos, and other files that people have sent you. Unless you are particularly attached to some of the messages, you can delete individual texts or entire conversations to reduce the amount of texts you have taking up space. There is also a setting you can enable to make sure that texts delete after a certain amount of time. To turn this feature on go to:

1. Settings
2. Messages
3. Tap on Keep Messages under Message History section
4. Tap on whatever amount of time you want
5. Tap on Delete in the popup menu to confirm you’d like iOS to delete any messages older than the specific time you choose.

Deleting and Re-installing Apps

We all have installed many apps on our iOS device, however few of us rarely do anything with them after they are installed on our iPhone. These apps can contain a lot of old data that piles up over time (this is particularly true of Facebook and Instagram). Unfortunately, there is no automatic update that will clear the caches in these apps. You can see which apps are taking up the most space by going to:

1. General
2. Usage
3. Storage

If the size of the app is greatly different from the documents and data, try and remove as much data as you can, or simply delete and reinstall the app. By clearing unnecessary data (or re-installing your apps), you clear out old history being saved by the app that you don’t need.

Clear Safari History

Another way to make more space on your iOS device is to get rid of the extra data in Safari. Safari will hold a lot of unnecessary information from various websites over time. You can clear this out by going to:

1. Settings
2. Safari
3. Clear History and Data

All of these tips are meant to give your iOS some breathing room by getting rid of things you didn’t even know were taking up space. Hopefully these tips have helped you reduce as much unnecessary data as possible!