Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Where did all my free space go??

A

AddisonIII

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 8, 2013
190
54
Well like so many others I took the plunge to iOS8 and now I am missing GB's of free space. My iPad had 32GB and while on iOS7 with my app's and videos I still had about 28 GB's free. I downloaded and installed the new OS from iTunes and then checked I was sitting with just 26.5GB free.
So I then went into setting and did a complete new install as if I were setting it up as new. After it finished I was then at 26 GB no Apps or videos only stock apps. very shortly after that 26 went to 25.6 GB free. Now oddly doing nothing to it, it's now at 25.5 and saying I have used 1.4GB.
How can this be??? I have never seen anything like this before on my iPad. Surely there must be a way to get back all of my free space. Any ideas as to how I can fix this problem????:(
 
AddisonIII said:
Someone else must have had this happen.. any Help for this problem?
Click to expand...

You see. When you install something, it takes up some space. You first have to download something new, unpackage it and then add it onto your existing group of files. This added information also adds to the space used in your drive.

When you use your device, new data is downloaded onto the device, so again, space is used...
 
I wonder if there is something left over after the update? I would try to reboot your iPad and see if that frees up any space. If not, go into Settings--> General--> Usage-->Manage Storage to see if you can determine what is taking up that extra space. Perhaps iOS 8 needs extra space above what iOS 7 used?
 
I only lost about 0.2 GB of space going from 7.1.1 to 8.0 using iTunes to upgrade on iPhone 5 w/ 16 GB.

So something must be different on your setup. Maybe something went wrong.
 
I am at a complete loss as to what is happening with my free space. Yesterday after Posting my problem I called Apple support and spent well over an hour with them. In the end the tech I worked with was clueless as I as to what is going on. My iPad was loosing free space just sitting and doing nothing. Changes were made to iCloud which seemed to have no effect. I even did a full as new restore twice that did no good other than it seemed to use even more free space.
Tech said he would have engineering look at his notes and that someone will get back to me today or tomorrow. It really is crazy to stop using your devise for a short time only to return and find it has used more space.
Surely there must be a way to stop this and get back the extra GB's its used.
 
Update to my Post: Yesterday I spend a few hours once again with Apple tech to try and find a reason why my iPad is using up free space when doing nothing to it. Tech had me do a new fresh clean install of ios8 again and this time taking note as to any loss of free space after the install of just the OS. My iPad is 32GB but as with every other storage unit I realize that it true amount is less. while installing ios8 I noticed the process said I had 29.3 approx available which seemed low to me, but really have no idea what it should have had at this point. after the install it showed it's usage at about 865mb but only 26.2 GB free. After leaving my ipad untouched for several minutes the numbers changed but very little so he had me reinstall my apps not from backup but from the app store. 19 app downloads later and checking usage it now says I'm using 2.2GB and have 24.7GB available.
Has anyone else had anything at all like this happen after installing ios8 ? Am I expecting to much?? the numbers just don't add up to me.
Comments are welcome
 
Ars Technica observed that when using comparable devices, the iOS 8 upgrade will take up an extra 740 MB to 1.03 GB of space. That's the real metric you should be looking at. If your free space was reduced by about that amount, then iOS 8 is the culprit.

Also, if you have not done a restore to factory settings in a while, you might have a lot of garbage data sitting around. I'm not sure if the iOS 8 installation removes all of that. I normally restore to factory settings before any major iOS update, but I do know that the minor iOS 7 updates did not remove any extraneous data besides system caches.

----------
AddisonIII said:
Update to my Post: Yesterday I spend a few hours once again with Apple tech to try and find a reason why my iPad is using up free space when doing nothing to it. Tech had me do a new fresh clean install of ios8 again and this time taking note as to any loss of free space after the install of just the OS. My iPad is 32GB but as with every other storage unit I realize that it true amount is less. while installing ios8 I noticed the process said I had 29.3 approx available which seemed low to me, but really have no idea what it should have had at this point. after the install it showed it's usage at about 865mb but only 26.2 GB free. After leaving my ipad untouched for several minutes the numbers changed but very little so he had me reinstall my apps not from backup but from the app store. 19 app downloads later and checking usage it now says I'm using 2.2GB and have 24.7GB available.
Has anyone else had anything at all like this happen after installing ios8 ? Am I expecting to much?? the numbers just don't add up to me.
Comments are welcome
Click to expand...

System and app caches will take up a lot of room. Plus, keep in mind that the downloaded size of an app does not necessarily equal the amount of space it takes after installation. Installation files are often compressed and after installation, the apps will also start allocating cache space.

The garbage data that I mentioned earlier normally shows up as "Other" and it largely consists of leftover data from failed downloads or outgoing text messages and attachments.
 
There are some apps Apple has installed with iOS 8 now
Namely iBooks health tips and podcasts.
Maybe that's using your space?
 
The m8 caches the motion data in the background to be available for the health app the next time it is opened. I suspect it carves out a chunk of drive space to reserve for this function.
 
This free space thing is so strange since I believe my Post indicated that the free space I have and shown is after a fresh install. all apps that I reinstalled were fresh right from the app store, and none have been used. I want to thank each of you responding and giving me feed back. With some luck someone will hit on what the cause is and then maybe I can reclaim some of this space.
 
You shouldn't worry because you made the smart choice of buying 32GB and you have plenty of space left. My computer from 02 had 80GB HDD and I only used something like 50GB and 20GB of those were video files.

26GB is a lot and enough, unless you hoard media
 
ScubaCinci said:
The m8 caches the motion data in the background to be available for the health app the next time it is opened. I suspect it carves out a chunk of drive space to reserve for this function.
Click to expand...

OP has an iPad, so it likely isn't that.

I also seem to be leaking storage on my iphone 5, but I'm hesitant to restore as new because one of my games doesn't store data in iCloud unless it's backed up. When I beat the game, I'll restore as new and finally have more than 12gb on my 16gb phone.
 
AddisonIII said:
Well like so many others I took the plunge to iOS8 and now I am missing GB's of free space. My iPad had 32GB and while on iOS7 with my app's and videos I still had about 28 GB's free. I downloaded and installed the new OS from iTunes and then checked I was sitting with just 26.5GB free.
So I then went into setting and did a complete new install as if I were setting it up as new. After it finished I was then at 26 GB no Apps or videos only stock apps. very shortly after that 26 went to 25.6 GB free. Now oddly doing nothing to it, it's now at 25.5 and saying I have used 1.4GB.
How can this be??? I have never seen anything like this before on my iPad. Surely there must be a way to get back all of my free space. Any ideas as to how I can fix this problem????:(
Click to expand...

I also lost 1 gig on my air 16 gb after updating to ios 8...
 
I'm pretty sure I've lost some useable space also. My 16GB LTE iPad Air has only 11.6 capacity under the "About" section.

I thought these things had 12-14Gb of useable space....
 
Doga said:
Haven't read through the entire thread, sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Watch the available space on your iPad - is it decreasing on its own? Twenty minutes ago I had 555 megabytes available on my new iPad Air and now it's down to 509.

What, is iOS 8 generating log files and not deleting them or something? Why would free space be dropping on its own when I'm not using the device?

I'm giving the Mini to a friend and when I erased / restored it this afternoon in iTunes I noticed that there was zero space left. When I first upgraded it to iOS 8 last week, it had at least a gig available.

This probably explains why my iPad Mini (non-retina) ran iOS 8 just fine for the first few days but slowed down considerably over time - this morning it was just awful. It must have been choking, with no storage space left.
Click to expand...

I posted this in the iOS Bugs thread yesterday. Sounds like the same thing, no?

My iPad Air was down to 464 megs of free space when I started started it up this morning, down from 555 when I started watching yesterday.

I'm applying the 8.0.2 update right now but I'll only be able to resume watching available space later in the day... gotta get to work, bleh. TGIF and good luck, y'all.
 
I lost 800MB on my 8GB iPhone 4S just by going from 7.1.2 to 8.0. I hate it, dearly.

It's just 10% of my storage, who cares.. Now I really want new device, so Apple accomplished what they wanted.

PS.: I'm expecting you, Apple advocates.
 
Natesac said:
I'm pretty sure I've lost some useable space also. My 16GB LTE iPad Air has only 11.6 capacity under the "About" section.

I thought these things had 12-14Gb of useable space....
Click to expand...

Yes, I had 12.7 on total capacity before and now just 11.7
 
I have the similar issue. Lost approx 1 GB space on my iPhone 5s after upgrading to iOS 8.

I do not see anything significant added by iOS 8 that will be around 1gb.

This needs to be fixed by Apple.
 
backup to iCloud (make sure to include photos). then reset all settings and data, restore from iCloud backup. Storage will go back to normal. Also, you should note that while iOS 7 took up 3.4 GB, iOS 8 takes up 3.9 GB. My 16 GB 5S used to have 12.6 total storage and now has 12.1 total storage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back