Over time, our iPhone storage fills up. It’s inevitable as even the smallest of things like using emails and web browsing can cost us in terms of storage space. But, it can be quite easy to undo. Although you will never get your storage totally back (unless you factory reset your device), you can easily сheck out these tips to free up some space.
Below is the number one quick fix for freeing up storage, followed by a few more suggestions.
Use the iCloud
Your number one friend when it comes to storage is cloud space. The cloud is another way of saying that you’re saving your files on someone else’s device (server) instead of yours. Of course, you may be concerned about security, but this is something that Apple takes seriously, and some may even argue it’s safer there than on your own device which can easily be lost or hacked.
To set this up, head over to Settings and tap on your name. From here, select “iCloud” and click on “iCloud Backup”, then turn on “iCloud Backup”. Finally, click “Back Up Now”.
Ideally, you will back up all of your media files to iCloud, such as videos and photos. This is a big culprit of taking up space, because many of us take and receive pictures daily. Having it saved on iCloud means we no longer need them saved on our internal storage. Apple takes care of this once the settings are set up, making it the number one way to passively get more storage. Documents and a few other things can also be saved there.
An app-based approach
If you still have issues with storage, that means your apps are a bigger issue than your media. This isn’t surprising as many of us are power users with a wide range of apps to deal with our business, play games on, and consume online media.
The obvious answer here is to simply delete unused apps. It’s important to recognize that you can quite easily redownload most apps within seconds, so there’s no need to hoard them. If it makes you feel more comfortable, create a note of all the apps you deleted so you don’t forget about them and their uses in the future.
However, you will also see that normal apps like Snapchat, Netflix, and Spotify are taking up far more space than they are supposed to. This is possibly because you’ve downloaded stuff from them (i.e. offline viewing of a Netflix film), which you may want to consider deleting, but it could also be cache. Cache are temporary files that apps create to help speed up the phone, but too much cache over time can lead to clogging up storage.
In either case, you can delete the app and then reinstall it again for it to reset back to its original file size. You can delete the cache within apps sometimes, like Snapchat, but many people report it to be faster to delete and install them.
Bonus tips
Finally, some other considerations to clear up storage include deleting unnecessary files, clearing browser cache, using third-party apps for photo compression, and transferring files over to the computer.
