Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, lays out a metric ton of iPhone/iPad storage saving tips.
Like this one:
Restarting your iPhone or iPad once a day not only ensures smoother than usual performance, it also gives iOS a chance to clear caches that are clogging up the ‘Other’ storage section, visible upon connecting an iOS device to iTunes. Cached files are created when streaming or viewing content like music, videos and photos.
You cannot delete these system caches manually as iOS automatically removes them when it needs more space. Restarting a device may prompt iOS to clear at least some cached content. To restart your device, hold down the power button until a “Slide to power off” message appears, then slide to restart.
And:
Force-restarting your device forces iOS to wipe clean its temporary files and purge caches. To perform a force restart, press and hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons simultaneously until an Apple logo appears. In addition to clearing caches, this method may help your device run a little faster for some time.
Never thought about force-restarting. I generally only do that when I do an iOS update. Any down side to this approach?
I’ve never had any problems following a force-restarting other than needing to re-sign into some things.
Another easy trick is installing & reinstalling the same apps. For example, Facebook tends to cache a lot of stuff that you may never use again.
If we are truly at the point where restarting an iPad is required on a daily basis can we be that far ahead of rebuilding the desktop as a troubleshooting device?
Well, in my opinion, force restarting might help with this particular problem. The problem with force restarting is that it might cause some stuff to broke because basically doing it is like unplugging a desktop computer and turning it on. I think that force restart should only be applied when it is impossible to turn the phone off in a regular way or when it completely freezes.
I’ve personally have done hard reset many times. The only time when I faced data loss was when my iPad was verifying software update. i don’t remember why I have done it but yeah, I had to restore it from backup.
About the whole thing. This is a good article and there’s a lot of useful stuff in it. The most useful tips are the ones about iCloud Photo Library and Apple Music. If you don’t want to use it you can try iTunes Match instead. It’s cheaper and, as far as I know, doesn’t wrap matched songs with FairPlay DRM.
i never had a problem with force restarting, and i do it from time to time, when the device behaves strange or feels sluggish. i wouldn’t feel comfortable doing a force restart on a daily basis. in my air 2, a normal restart seems to cure most problems as well – on my old ipad 1 a force restart was probably necessary once every few days to get it up to speed again. no problems there as well, it just took longer to reboot. but this was ios 5, things might have changed since then.
i delete and reinstall facebook on a regular basis because of is. plus, sometimes i live without a facebook app for days without realizing, which is a nice benefit.
you can also delete and reinstall e-mail accounts to free up space.
Downside: you’re obsessing over managing what should happen automatically. And publicizing this will probably create a generation of folks who do this long after iOS adjusts cache management for people who rarely restart.
Can articles about zapping the iPad’s PRAM and defragmenting the file storage be far behind?