Space used on iOS

I must confess some confusion related to the space used by DTTG when syncing:

1)I had to reinstall DTTG on my iPhone because I was continually asked to redownload the databases, which had no effect. I decided to only sync the Global Inbox (18MB). This took over an hour, with the space used by DTTG rising to nearly 3GB in the process. Once it was done, however, it went down to 1.6GB. Still quite a lot for a few pdfs.

  1. I decided to reinstall DTTG on my iPad after the storage used rose to c. 260GB, which the system appeared unable to decide whether that space was taken up by by DTTG or the System. Here I synced the Global Inbox and one other database - the latter set to download on demand. It’s a very big database (125GB), but I was still surprised to see DTTG rise to 55GB. Now I’m downloading c. 40GB of files, and the Info panel in DTTG is saying I’ve got 34GB, and iOS is reporting 121GB used.

In both instances this seems like vastly more overhead, for a want of a better term, than on macOS - and it thus also takes a much longer time to sync than expected.

The space reported by iOS is usually quite unreliable and seems to be very inconsistent.

Though I can’t speak to those exact numbers, if the database is full of text-based files and PDFs, the full text is included in the metadata. This can take up a considerable amount of space, so a shallow sync (Download Files:On demand) may not save as much space as you imagine it would.