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Apps in iTunes taking up space, safe to remove?

Z

Ztormie

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 30, 2009
120
5
Before iCloud I had my iPhone and iPad backups saved on my iMac's harddrive in iTunes, together with all Apps I've downloaded and so forth. But with iCloud the backups are in the cloud and not needed to take up space on the hard drive.

I recently checked the map for the apps and it was over 35 GB. Now with the iMac and its 1TB hard drive this was never an issue, but now I'm thinking about selling it and just keep everything on my Air with 128 GB of space it certainly will be. But since my Apple Id is linked with the App store, so I can re-download apps I've bought and deleted, do I actually need to have them saved on my hard drive or could I just delete that huge map? What purpose does that map have now with Apple knowing which apps I bought and me being able to re-download them?
 
You can re-download apps as long as they are still on the App Store, and your device has an up-to-date version of iOS (may be an issue when your device is older). You might want to keep a copy of your most precious apps.

Also keep any apps you have on the device. I did a sync with my phone recently and it deleted the apps from the phone that I had deleted from my Mac. I did get a warning, but misread it. It is better to be safe than sorry.
 
You can delete them, just keep the ones you want to keep your settings for. You can always re-download them any time from the app store anyways.

Any you delete from the library will be removed from your devices on iTunes sync though.
 
Ztormie said:
But since my Apple Id is linked with the App store, so I can re-download apps I've bought and deleted, do I actually need to have them saved on my hard drive or could I just delete that huge map? What purpose does that map have now with Apple knowing which apps I bought and me being able to re-download them?
Click to expand...

Why not just save them on a few DVDs? That way, you can always restore one in case Apple drops it from the app store.
 
Just FYI

If you remove them and Apple pulls the app (VLC) then you have no way of ever getting it back if you have to do a restore on your device unless you keep that copy on your computer.
 
The DVD backup is a good idea but where is the folder hidden on os x? I ran into that problem before when a app was removed from the store
 
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