Storage usage

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Storage usage

My wife’s iPad has 16 GB of storage and is still running iOS 7.1.2.

I tap Settings and clear Safari's history, cookies and data.

I then tap Settings > General > About where I am informed that the storage capacity is 12.8 GB. So I presume that the iOS operating system is occupying the remaining 3.2 GB. I am also informed that the available storage is 9.4 GB. This latter fact is reinforced if I tap Settings > General > Usage where I see “9.4 GB Available” and “3.4 GB Used”.

However, if I add up all the individual storage usages of the apps listed on the Usage page, the total comes to about 500 MB only - say about 0.5 GB. My question therefore is what is using the remaining 2.9 GB of storage?

iPad Air, iOS 7.1.2

Posted on Oct 8, 2015 8:26 AM

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Idomeneus Author

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Oct 23, 2015 6:32 AM in response to Idomeneus

Yesterday, I visited my local Apple store and spoke with one of their technical people. He told me that iOS does not recalculate the storage used when you delete an object such as an app, a photo, a video, an installation image, etc.. Put another way, iOS does not have a garbage collector which recovers the storage released by deleting an object. It all doesn't sound very good to me.

According to the person I spoke to, there are only two ways in which you can force iOS to recover the storage no longer being used by objects that you have deleted in the past:

Install the latest update to iOS (in my wife's case, that would mean updating to iOS 9.1), or
Reset the iPad

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