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dawso1ba

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 2, 2010
22
4
I was just wondering what everyone thinks about deleting hard copies of apps? I mean I have a few I have backed up like handy light and vlc player... But really is there any need to save 20-30 Gb of apps?? Afterall it is all in the cloud now...
 

Thetonyk123

macrumors 68000
Aug 14, 2011
1,627
1
Earth
I was just wondering what everyone thinks about deleting hard copies of apps? I mean I have a few I have backed up like handy light and vlc player... But really is there any need to save 20-30 Gb of apps?? Afterall it is all in the cloud now...
Alot of people don't have that many apps and I like having it locally on my hard disk
 

Ashwood11

macrumors 65816
Nov 10, 2010
1,153
0
US
All of our purchased apps can be redownloaded from the App Store. If you select the Purchased Tab it will show you what you have purchased.
 

SplicedBanjo

macrumors regular
Dec 13, 2011
109
0
Apps get pulled from the App Store all the time, sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. If you delete your local copy and the app is discontinued, you may not be able to re-download it.

I have heard of some cases where people actually were able to re-download discontinued apps, but also other cases where they weren't.
 

beq

macrumors member
Dec 13, 2011
67
4
Good point, I have had apps pulled from the App Store that I was still interested in loading on our new iPhones/iPads. Week Cal HD for iPad (before iOS 5 broke it), iFitness/Full Fitness, VLC Player, etc.

Although being pulled or discontinued means these apps are no longer updated and eventually stop working 100% or become stale relative to the competition, motivating me to eventually find replacement apps...

Plus having gotten used to operating our iPhones/iPads independently of the computer thanks to iCloud/iOS 5, needing to sync back to iTunes on the computer just to add these pulled apps (to new or restored devices) feels like more of a hassle than before.

But anyways, my curated list of iOS apps on the computer grew beyond 100 GB (even after deleting the purchased apps I no longer want to keep), and my HDD ran out of space. I used to also maintain these apps on my family's other computers around the house which still have enough HDD space, but it just made their imaging backups that much bigger. And constantly updating the apps in iTunes was a real hassle (with thousands of apps there's always a lot that have updates everyday), since I was kinda OCD about updating...

So I gave up maintaining the computer copies of apps, although updating the apps on all our iPhones/iPads is still a hassle :) I wish iOS 5 has automatic background app updates, and even better, delta/differential app updates to cut down on the time and bandwidth.
 

urkel

macrumors 68030
Nov 3, 2008
2,795
917
We have 4 iOS devices. Sometimes these apps are 300MB-1GB so allowing iTunes to download updated apps and then syncing is easier than downloading the same app 4x on each individual device.

Also, the iTunes Store is one of the slowest online applications out there. So if I remove an app and then want to put it back then its much faster to click the checkbox in iTunes rather than try searching through the sluggish iTunes Store again.
 

HabSonic

macrumors regular
Jul 31, 2011
151
6
Canada
20-30Gb of apps? Most people hardly use and backup 5Gb of apps.

I like having copies of my app because Apple can pull them off the App Store and it's way faster to reinstall a bunch of app that way.
 

beq

macrumors member
Dec 13, 2011
67
4
In my case each family member has own computer to sync their iPhone and iPad, so I was still downloading each app multiple times to each computer. (It's a real juggling act when you have more than 5 computers and 10 devices.)
 

PNutts

macrumors 601
Jul 24, 2008
4,874
357
Pacific Northwest, US
I'm not ready to put 100% trust into the cloud yet. I still make infrequent backups to iTunes. I know this is a weak argument, but my fear is that at 2 AM I'll want to download some app I've purchased and get some kind of an "We're performing maintenance, try again later" message.
 
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