HELP! I'm out of storage on my iPad!!

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I am often asked, "my iPad is telling me I am out of free space, what can I do to get more?"  Unlike most Android tablets which have an SD card slot for expanding storage, the iPad does not have one.  Sure you can buy the 5-in-1 camera connection kit but really who wants have a gadget sticking out the bottom of their device?

So what can you do?  To start off, delete apps you no longer use or need.  This is as simple as browsing your home screens, tap and hold on an app until it begins to wiggle and then tap on the x in the corner of the app to remove. 

If, after removing unwanted apps, you still do not have enough free space.  Open SETTINGS > GENERAL > USAGE > MANAGE STORAGE.  This will show a list of items from the largest storage hog to the smallest.  Often I see, as in this example, "Photos & Camera" taking up the most space.  Often several gigs of data is used.

You have a couple options for fixing this!  The first, delete some pictures and videos.  I'd start with videos first, they generally take up more space than pictures do. 

Another option, the solution I use and recommend, is to create a  Dropbox account, download and install the app from either the Google Play store or Apple App store, then enable automatic Camera Uploads in the Dropbox app settings.  I do this on my cell phone and my tablet.  Soon as I take a picture or record a video, it gets uploaded to a "Camera Uploads" folder in Dropbox automatically. 

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Don't be too concerned that you start with 2GB of data.  They offer many ways to obtain FREE storage increases and sometimes run 'special' promotions.  For example, in 2012, they would increase your storage by having camera uploads turned on and at the time the more pictures you uploaded within the designated timeframe you would get more storage.  The promotion had a limit of 4.5 GB of storage, which is still a lot of pictures!  By the time the promotion was done, I had increased my storage space to 6.5 GB.  You can also refer friends and when they sign up you earn a bonus 125 MB per friend.  Sometimes the device you use to sync to Dropbox can give you an unexpected bonus.  My Galaxy S Tab when I activated Dropbox on it, gave me a whopping 50 GB of additional storage space!  I currently have 56.5 GB of cloud storage to use in any way I want and didn't have to spend a penny for a premium account.  Of course, you can upgrade to a paid plan and get a whole lot more storage - at the time of this post, you can get 1 TB of storage for under $100 a year.  Another nice benefit of this is you can browse your cloud storage, not just from your phone or tablet but also from any internet connected computer!  This is the solution I suggest and recommend and have been using it since 2011.  As another nice feature, you can also manually move many documents on your device to Dropbox.  Look for the "Open In..." icon to see if your app gives the option to save to another location other than the device.  In cases where there is not, you can always email the file to yourself.  This could be a long process if you have a lot of data to save.  You can even try connecting your iPad to iTunes and see if you can transfer files using it.

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Google Drive is another cloud storage solution that would also allow you to access your pictures and files from any internet connected computer.  With it, you would enable Backup & Sync from within Google Photos.  I am quite happy with Dropbox, and therefore I have not investigated Google's option thoroughly to be able to praise it enough to truly recommend.  Google Apps, might be a future post one day.

Now for more drastic measures!  If after you have done everything above to free up space and still need more, you could wipe the iPad and start it from fresh!  iOS 9 uses less space than previous versions did, which is good.  So going this direction, delete as many apps as it takes to get enough free space to upgrade.  Then update the iPad by going to SETTINGS > GENERAL > SOFTWARE UPDATE.  Go through the process by following on screen directions, it'll take a little while to download and install so be patient.  Once the iPad has finished the upgrade process, go back to SETTINGS > GENERAL and scroll the right side of the screen down to the bottom and tap on RESET and then select Erase All Content and Settings.  This will erase everything and the iPad will be back at factory settings.  Complete the initial setup of the iPad and sign into the Apple App store and reinstall the apps you want by tapping on the Purchased tab at the bottom and tap on the cloud icon next to the apps.  Don't forget to setup your Dropbox or Google Drive apps from the start so it will backup your data from the beginning!