is apple filling up the storage on older devices to force you to get a new one?

y_p_w wrote:

It happens - primarily where it seems to collect ridiculous amounts of "other" or "system data". Not sure why, but I've had this problem since my first iPhone. It's drastic, but resetting and restoring from a backup at least temporarily clears that up.

I doubt that it's anything intentional, but it is something I've noticed for some time.

It's been an issue with iOS devices for pretty much as long as there've been iOS devices. It's become less of a problem over time. So, my feeling is that it's not a question of Apple doing something to old devices but rather newer devices are, for whatever reason, less prone to the problem. In some cases, that could be because they support a newer version of iOS that just doesn't do that.

tlohse77 wrote:

Hmm that is really weird. What I can’t think of any single app that would fill up your storage space like that. Perhaps what you could do is pay like 2.99 a month and have like 100gb of iCloud.

Sometimes "System Data" just balloons. A lot is likely temporary files that aren't necessarily needed, but iPadOS doesn't always do frequent enough "garbage collection" where it free up space. Here's an example I found online:

In this case it's highly unlikely that more than half of the available storage is actually needed for any kind of System Data. But it's not available for other uses until the operating system cleans it up.

y_p_w wrote:

Just for the heck of it, I did the whole reset then restore thing - of course after making sure I had a backup right before starting the reset.

I think restoring the back up is part of the problem. The OP has something corrupted.

It happens - primarily where it seems to collect ridiculous amounts of "other" or "system data". Not sure why, but I've had this problem since my first iPhone. It's drastic, but resetting and restoring from a backup at least temporarily clears that up.

I doubt that it's anything intentional, but it is something I've noticed for some time.

Redoverlander wrote:

Although both iPads have been running up on my wall hosting a camera feed for over 5 years. maybe I shouldn't complain.

While it may seem like a waste (I don't disagree with you but that's a conversation for a different kind of forum), if you've had the iPads plugged in continuously and running for five years, I'm not surprised they're failing. When I worked for a cell phone company, all of the display tablets (that were plugged in and continuously running) had a very short lifespan, even compared to similarly used phones. This tended to be even more true of Samsung tablets but, iPads also eventually succumbed. So, I think you may have hardware issues.

iPads may not be constructed for continuous use of storage. Flash memory storage has “endurance” limits where it starts requiring more error correction and eventually fails the more instances of each storage cell being erased for the next write.

Theres a way to vastly increase the endurance at the expense of cost, but it’s rare these days except for some enterprise class requirements. And those usually involve replaceable storage anyways. The storage on an iPad can’t be replaced. There are tricks to get around endurance issues (like SLC cache) but that won’t necessarily help for anything that would fill up the storage of a drive.

It's really not that likely that storage will shrink. It's almost always "overprovisioned" so that if there's any kind of impending failure, previously unused sections will be made available. And if it's worse than that it's going to be more severe.

If there's anything, it's likely whatever apps you're using. Just have a look at Settings > General > iPad Storage to see what's taking up available space.

Try restoring them to factory state. Something in your data is corrupted and is filling up the space.

hey "redoverlander" what I did with my iCloud storage was getting full of music and photos so I ...

1.i backed up all my photos to a 1 tera-byte USB drive.

2.i and I put all my music on an old iPod I had.

so, you try it and let me know how it went.

Just for the heck of it, I did the whole reset then restore thing - of course after making sure I had a backup right before starting the reset.

It's not a perfect comparison because it didn't necessarily load all the same applications. I think with any restore it probably looks at apps that aren't used and then opts to not load them unless the user specifically chooses to. System Data seems down, but it was going up and down earlier as the apps were being loaded over the air.

Also - the way storage is reported differs on a Mac in Finder, and the numbers don't necessarily match. Plus the categories aren't the same.

tlohse77 wrote:

Hmm that is really weird. What I can’t think of any single app that would fill up your storage space like that. Perhaps what you could do is pay like 2.99 a month and have like 100gb of iCloud.

That will not free up space on your phone.