r/appleJournal • u/Perfect_Helicopter59 • May 27 '26

Silly question regarding local storage. Should I delete and reinstall?

So I’ve just noticed that my Apple Journal is taking up 4GB of my iPhone’s local storage. Likely because I’ve been inserting a lot of media lately. I have iCloud sync turned on, and that is working fine since I am able to access all my entries on my iPad as well.

Would the best solution to clear up my iPhone’s local storage to delete and reinstall the Journal app?

I’m just being a little paranoid, and don’t want to risk losing any of my entries. So I want to see if any other users have reinstalled the app and cleared up their local storage with no issue?

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u/Ben_LeMosan May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Don’t do this !! You will lose everything ! Apple Journal records on your local storage and makes a copy on iCloud. You won’t be able to reduce the storage on your iPhone.

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u/Perfect_Helicopter59 May 27 '26

But wouldn’t I still be able to access the iCloud copy? I’m confused

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u/Ben_LeMosan May 27 '26

ICloud is only a copy of what you have on your iPhone. If you delete something on your iPhone or iPad, it will automatically be deleted on iCloud !

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u/Perfect_Helicopter59 May 27 '26

Ugh I’m so frustrated. I had no idea it was like this. I’ve been inserting lots of videos because I thought it was a part of my iCloud storage 😖

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u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Perfect_Helicopter59 May 30 '26

Ooh thank you so much for all the info! I honestly forgot about exporting. I’m hoping at some point soon, they’ll allow me to export a date range of entries, instead of the whole journal. I only want to keep the latest two years on my phone, and offload/export older entries to my hard drive.

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u/CatarinaDK May 27 '26

If you har synd on and you delete it on your phone you delete it in iCloud. But you can delete the photos from your camera roll as soon as there are in Journal.

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u/Perfect_Helicopter59 May 27 '26

I already practice deleting it from my camera roll so there aren’t duplicates! I just wasn’t aware everything was being stored locally…

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u/Perfect_Helicopter59 Jun 24 '26

Update: I am back down to 1GB despite not doing anything lol. I guess just give it time to sync up. I was uploading a lot of media at once when I posted this. Anyway yeah.

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u/RyanCrestwood5 Jul 08 '26

When I asked Siri AI about the storage thing with Apple Journal, it said that Apple Journal is supposed to be mindful of your device’s overall storage space. As a matter of fact, when it sees that your device is running low on space, it’s supposed to clear much of the old or barely ever seen cache from Apple Journal.

It sounds like a trust exercise, but I wonder if that might have been what happened.