OK, so I know I’m always going on about how such-and-such is my favorite feature. You’re all getting tired of it, aren’t you? Well, I can do what I want, so there. Fortunately, what I talk about in this tip isn’t my favorite feature of iOS 5 (whew! dodged a bullet!), but it’s pretty handy. Did you know you can see storage information for both iCloud and your device within iOS 5, including how much space individual apps use? I’m gonna tell you how, and we’ll all know a lot more about what’s on our devices. Even if this isn’t our favorite thing ever.
So open Settings from your iOS 5 gadget, and then choose General. Click on the Usage option, and a world of information will open up to you. You can find out how much total space you’re using on your device and how much each app is taking up all by its lonesome. The apps are organized in descending order by the amount of data they have.
If you’re on the bleeding edge and are already using iCloud, there’s also an area to check out how much storage you’re using there; scroll down on that same screen to see it. And if you click on Manage Storage from underneath that section, you can see exactly how you’re using your allotted 5 GB of Apple’s servers.
If you’ve chosen to back up to iCloud (which you can manage from Settings > iCloud), click on your device’s name from the Manage Storage screen to see which apps are being backed up and when your device last completed a backup. It’s easy to decide here if you’d like to exclude a particularly large app from being backed up, too. The world is your iOS oyster.
Favorite feature or not, that’s going to really help me a lot. I mean, can you imagine the horror if I went to download the latest episode of Bob’s Burgers and didn’t have enough space for it? Ah, first-world problems.