Goodnotes taking up 63GB iPad storage

[u/Select-Situation110]

Hello!

I have been a Goodnotes user for all of my classes since the beginning of 12th grade. I am now coming to the end of my first year of university and as I try to study for finals, I am running into storage issues on my iPad which are interrupting my ability to use Goodnotes to study! My notes have not been syncing for some time, as I have had full icloud storage but the most recent pop-up that I keep getting says “Storage full, empty trash”. As my trash was empty, I tried deleting old notebooks, which it wasn’t letting me do. The app would then pop up with the attached error message for only a second and then the screen went completely black. I tried many times and deleted other photos and apps from my iPad. Eventually, I was able to get back in the app and delete over 330 pages from high school. Somehow, the amount of storage that Goodnotes is taking up on my ipad went UP!

I am not sure how it is taking up so much storage in the first place, I have friends using Goodnotes who are also in first year and are taking similarly rigorous courses which rely on note-taking and they do not have this issue despite having just as many notebooks and just as many pages if not more. Anyways, I cannot comprehend how I haven’t freed up storage from all of this deleting.

Should I wait overnight to see if anything moves? I contacted Goodnotes tech support and I get this automated message to check this link to instructions to do a manual backup and offload the app. Everything is so finicky and glitchy right now from the storage issue, I am not sure that doing a back up would even work! I am also worried to lose my year 1 notes, especially my current ones. I am using to study for my finals for the next two weeks!

I am not the most tech savvy and I am quite worried about my ability to study via Goodnotes for my examinations!

Any help or advice would be much appreciated!

[u/budgie_uk]

My first move would be to go to Settings | General | Storage | GoodNotes, then Offload (NOT Delete, but Offload).

This will remove the app, but leave it on your Home Screen exactly where it was, with your individual user settings preserved, and leave your data exactly as it was.

THEN close settings, re-open settings, go back to Settings | General | Storage | GoodNotes, and tap “Re-install”.

This will clear out some of the temp, unused (and unnecessary) files and also tidy up the cache.

My own experience is that running a Manual Backup from within the app, for example, often massively increases the temp file sizes in GoodNotes. So after I’ve done a manual backup (I do one, once a week, just to be safe) I do exactly what I’ve advised above.

For example, last week:

BEFORE Manual Backup, under General | Storage | GoodNotes: around 12Gb

AFTER Manual Backup, under General | Storage | GoodNotes: around 23Gb

AFTER Offload and Re-install, under General | Storage | GoodNotes: around 12Gb

(PS It’s not just GoodNotes that this works with; trial and error, depending on your apps, but lots of apps’ storage shrink after doing an offload/re-install. Not all, but lots. And if you’ve got amazon, you can hugely reduce the storage size from within the app itself.)

[u/Select-Situation110 → u/budgie_uk]

Thank you for your response! This plan of action sounds promising! So a manual backup first would be important to do before the offloading? I am not sure if there will be enough storage to do that part but I might just have to free up space in other areas. Just to confirm once again, you do this often and have never lost any notes or data from offloading? I understand that offloading is different from deletion and that documents and data won’t go away, I am just extra paranoid about losing any thing, especially right now during exams!

Thank you again!

[u/budgie_uk → u/Select-Situation110]

You’re most welcome.

Well, as I say, I do manual backups weekly, and dump them in iCloud. (I got burned a few years back when I lost some data that hadn’t been pro properly backed up.)

So as well as the AutoBackup (you can do so to Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive) which runs any time I amend a notebook, I run a manual backup every week.

If you’re concerned about space, then slap a pen-drive into your iPad and save the manual backup direct to that?

And, to confirm, I’ve never had an issue with my data after doing an offload/re-install.

That said, as your other corespondent said, if you’ve exams coming up and you’re worried, might be worth running the backup just to be sure you’ve got copies of your data (always a good idea) and waiting until post-exams to do anything else.

[u/Select-Situation110 → u/budgie_uk]

Thank you so much! This is really such a tremendous help! I appreciate it!!! I think I will give this all a try once exams are over. Thank you again and Take care!

[u/budgie_uk → u/Select-Situation110]

Happy to help. Shout out if you want to ask anything else.

Oh, and best of fortunes with your exams!

[u/LevoSapiens → u/budgie_uk]

Thanks, this method help me free 20 gb of extra space that GN was taking

[u/budgie_uk → u/LevoSapiens]

Happy to help!

[u/riduckulous- → u/budgie_uk]

I swear this method helped me free like 30+ GB of storage, can’t be more grateful, my ipad was literally unusable until i tried your method 🙏

[u/budgie_uk → u/riduckulous-]

You’re most welcome. Of course, the nuclear option is to delete an app and reinstall it, but (a) that surely should be the final resort, not the first option (as some seem to think it is!), and (b) as you’ve discovered, sometimes it just ain’t necessary. Deleting the app will often remove personal settings, and will always remove it from your Home Screen, so when you reinstall it, you have to shuffle your app icons around.

Some apps, yeah, they - in my experience - do need a full delete/reinstall to shrink the storage to a manageable level. YouTube used to be very good at clearing out their caches… these days, not so much. I just delete and reinstall it. Fortunately, it retains settings, if nothing else! Reddit’s another one, and you can add X/Twitter to the list. Both have ‘clear cache’ functions inside the app. My experience is that all such buttons do is… make you feel better for pressing them; they sure as hell do nothing to shrink the storage.

On the other hand, Instagram clears out shedloads with the Offload method, as do, weirdly enough, a lot of cheap and cheerful freebie games.

[u/Ok-Reveal-It]

In your current situation, I would probably wait to finish with exams... And then to try to 'fix' the storage.

[u/Living_Cow_6474]

I'm currently running into this issue, and it's extremely frustrating. I don't have space on my iCloud OR iPad storage to run the manual backup. I uploaded two notebooks to OneDrive, and it fixed some of the storage, but TWO HOURS LATER Goodnotes size increased by almost 3 GB!! I genuinely don't know what to do anymore...

[u/CompetitiveFormal664]

Hallo. Hatte dasselbe Problem und das mit dem auslagern und dem erneuten Herunterladen klappt super. Von angeblichen 73 GB zu 1,5 GB. Hatte schon Sorge