Should I Factory Restore?

I have had an iPad 4 for many years and I'm wondering about freeing up space on it. I've never done a factory restore on it and wonder if that would be a good idea from time to time. Or would it be just as easy to delete the apps that are big users of space and then reinstall them?

I have about 9.83GB of Documents and Data usage on my 32GB HD and would like to shrink that some if I can.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Welcome to our forums.

You have plenty of room remaining on your iPad. There is no need to restore it or remove - delete apps. Why do you want to do so?

I use my iPad to watch movies and TV shows on and wanted to free up more space to add more of them but if I have to remove some of my apps, photos or music to gain back some space I'll do that I guess. I just thought there might be a way to reduce that D & D usage easily. I'll just delete other things. Thanks for the reply.

@Bundyman

32GB is not a huge amount of storage these days, after taking the iOS into account.

If you open your iPad Go into Settings > General > About. Look down the list for Capacity (32GB) and next down "Available". That's what we need to know - how many GB available.

Next, still in Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > then Under Storage, Click on Manage Storage.

This will give you, not only "Used" and "Available"; but in the populated list below, show how much space each app is taking up.

Instead of doing a Factory Reset, you may find it more useful to delete/then reinstall some apps that have accumulated a lot of baggage. The app may be small in storage requirements, but the additional scruff may be considerable. By removing the app, you remove the data associated with it and by reinstalling, you get the functioning app back again, but without the garbage.

If you were to follow this line of thought, it's best done via USB connection to iTunes, having first made sure that all your apps are up to date in iTunes.

Deleting and reinstalling is then a doddle.

Just a few ideas to mull over.

Ian

If you move audio/video onto the iPas regularly try the procedure I discussed on a previous Sunday video chat. You can find the procedure outlined here.

For users with as much free space as you have it may not make a difference but some users have reported pretty good gains. Since you have enough space to download a full video without necessarily getting the warning make sure to choose something you want to see.

Thanks very much for the advice. I've been able to get some extra space back. I'll keep working at it when time permits and see if I can get more.

Just out of curiosity, how much space have you gotten back so far? I only recovered a few hundred MB IIRC but I don't add much video or music to my phone sine it is only 16 GB.

And using the info I posted in #4, how much "Available" space do you actually have, Bundyman?

Ian

Factory restore would clean off everything. I suggest you not to do that. You should delete some of the apps and then reinstall them. That my friend surely a good idea. Documents and Data is really a big trouble for me as well. It's getting bigger and bigger day by day. And there is not really a solution for this matter.