A new / old topic about iPad’s System Data becoming bloated

Platforms iPhone & iPad
1

I’ve noticed that when I delete a video from my iPad (either from within Infuse or through the Files app) that the video will be moved to the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder. Once I delete this file, the size of that file gets ‘added’ to the System Data amount as shown within the iPad Storage section within Settings. I have been deleting numerous files from my iPad and adding them to a cloud system. My problem is that my System Data amount has ballooned to about 100GB before I realised what had happened.

I saw that there was an old topic about this but seemed more sensible to create a new topic as it was so much older and time/ tech has changed.

Did anyone ever come up with a solution to ‘claim back’ this space without having to completely restore their iPad and start from scratch?

Thanks

2

The system manages its own storage and it’s not always easy to get this to purge itself.

This is one method which has been reported to work.

  1. Turn on Airplane Mode
  2. Change the date manually to 2028 (or something at least 1+ year into the future)
  3. Leave your phone idle for 2-3 minutes and don’t open other apps
  4. Change the date back to today (or enable automatic time)
  5. Turn off Airplane mode and check your storage
3

Thank you James,

I tried this before and it slightly worked insofar as I was able to go from about 70gb to 60gb. Subsequently (ie 2 days later) my System Data is now at about 95gb.

I tried this process again and it now no longer seems to have any effect.