Other Storage Taking Too Much Space

Hi Dev Team,

I don’t see many answers on this topic but this seems to be a real concern for many users.

I went from my IPhone 8+ with 256gb and I had 39gb used, about 7gb was other storage no big deal. I decided to go with an iPhone 12 Pro Max 128gb. I now have 60gb used of which 26gb is other storage!!! I have done 3 clean installs from different iCloud backups and no change. I do not buy an iPhone to see half of my storage being used by other and system storage.
Also I do not explain why I now see some gb with photos and messages as it is normally all stored on iCloud (I have 2.2tb). Same thing I do not subscribe to iCloud or AppleOne to have data store on my iPhone while it should be all on iCloud.
I did not have this on my 8+. I called Apple but they were clueless...simply telling me that it is normal and that it may take a few days for things to get back to normal...it is not true.
is that a bug? My iPhone flash memory corrupted?Will this be taken into consideration?
Anyone else having this issue please post.

Thanks much!
X
  • I am having the same problem. I don't understand the “system data” took 60.85 GB In my iPhone. Total GB I HAVE 128

    I AM LITERALLY LEFT WITH NOTHING.

    If anyone finds a solution, share it with me

  • Same problem here, and just got off chatting with the useless Apple chat support executives. Idiots wasted my time and just suggested to do factory reset followed by backup!! On my iphone, it happened because I was trying to send large files by maildrop. I was trying to send 500+ pics/videos, having size of about 3.5 GB using email/mail drop. I tried 3-4 times, and Every time the process failed it kept keeping that much space blocked!! So after 3 attempts I got left with 0 space and about 13 GB of data showing in “Other System Data”! And that, after I deleted so many apps, files, to make way for more space!! Basically, Apple keeps storing the deleted file in cache, and doesn’t even allow us to delete those!! Btw, I already tried the usual suggestions, and they all fail- clearing safari cache, disconnecting mail accounts, etc etc. Nothing works, and I don’t want to go for Facroey reset. What a ****** situation!

  • I was in the same situation but I found out that restarting your phone helps reduce the amount of storage taken up by the system data. To restart your phone you need to go to settings and when you get to setting scroll and press general. Then scroll again and you will see an option that says ‘shut down’ in blue. Click that and your phone will restart. This doesn’t get rid of any of the data on your phone just the stuff that isn’t needed. Your phone will go black (how it looks when it is turned off) then hold on the power button until you see the apple logo on your screen. Now wait for your phone to fully turn on and check if it helped

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Side note if this can help. This is getting worse as soon as I disconnect from iCloud and reconnect. I wanted to try this to see if it help. But after doing it twice within 2 days, once I reconnect the other storage is going dramatically up. I was at 25gb of other storage. Juste disconnect ans reconnected I am at 40gb of other storage. Time ans leaving the iPhone plugged in does seem to help! Please help!
  • Same thing happened to me

  • This site help me a lot ---------> [https://not.justsolutionsproducts.com/how-to-fix-other-storage-taking-too-much-space-easily/)

  • I’m having some serious issues. I barely have any apps on. My phone. When I tried to do a software update I couldn’t because the system data was taking up 25 gigs somehow. Idk how tf that is even possible. Anyone know why and how to fix please your help would be very appreciated thankyou

Replies

Side note if this can help. This is getting worse as soon as I disconnect from iCloud and reconnect. I wanted to try this to see if it help. But after doing it twice within 2 days, once I reconnect the other storage is going dramatically up. I was at 25gb of other storage. Juste disconnect ans reconnected I am at 40gb of other storage. Time ans leaving the iPhone plugged in does seem to help! Please help!
  • Same thing happened to me

  • This site help me a lot ---------> [https://not.justsolutionsproducts.com/how-to-fix-other-storage-taking-too-much-space-easily/)

  • I’m having some serious issues. I barely have any apps on. My phone. When I tried to do a software update I couldn’t because the system data was taking up 25 gigs somehow. Idk how tf that is even possible. Anyone know why and how to fix please your help would be very appreciated thankyou

I am having this same issue. I was using 56GB (2GB of that was "other") of 512GB on iphone xs. So I figured 128GB of space was plenty. I upgraded to iphone 12 pro max and my other storage is sitting at 56GB. That makes my phone almost full. I had to delete a bunch of apps to get rid of the storage error.
The weird thing is that my messages on my old phone are 17GB, while new phone is only 9GB.

I reset to factory couple times and the other storage is still the same. Quite frustrating.

I can't seem to find any fixes for this online either.
I am having the same problem.
I can understand the “system” to take up to 8 or 9GB.
But the “other system data” takes up to 18.56GB in my iPhone. That’s way too much and it is unacceptable.
Not only that, but if you combine it with the “system” it takes about 26GB in my phone!!!
That’s absurd!

If I knew that, I would have chosen a phone with a better memory.
I have the 64GB iPhone, I AM LITERALLY LEFT WITH NOTHING.
And I noticed that the “other system data” is slowly growing, yesterday it was 15... today 18.56! Just like that!

To me, this is very annoying, because I use my iPhone with my action cam and drone.

Do not get me wrong, I do know that when they tell you the phone has 64GB, it doesn’t actually have 64GB of free space. I understand that very well, but this is exaggerated.

It is the first time I buy an iPhone, I can tell that I am not happy at all about the memory issue.

If I’ll find a solution, I’ll share it with you.
  • I was in the same situation but I found out that restarting your phone helps reduce the amount of storage taken up by the system data. To restart your phone you need to go to settings and when you get to setting scroll and press general. Then scroll again and you will see an option that says ‘shut down’ in blue. Click that and your phone will restart. This doesn’t get rid of any of the data on your phone just the stuff that isn’t needed. Your phone will go black (how it looks when it is turned off) then hold on the power button until you see the apple logo on your screen. Now wait for your phone to fully turn on and check if it helped

  • Unfortunately, This didnt work. Apple really needs to figure this out. Its just another way to make people buy more expensive phones with more storage as Im reading online. I have an iPhone 14 2 weeks old and **I have 35 GB in other system data. ** No reason why Apple doesnt know what to do....

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I have same problem too!

i use iphone X with storage 256GB, wanted to move to iphone 12 pro 256GB, i didnt used all my 256GB but it keep showing failed to transfer as not enough space.

what do you mean not enough space where my iphone X have plenty of storage?

and whats wrong with HEALTH app? It took 15.58 PB? Tried to clear every data and it seems not doing anything.


Same Problem here (Iphone 12 Pro Max 512Gb : My Photos and Video usage grew in a instance.

The rest of my data compared with my just transfered data from my Iphone X Max is OK.

What did i do :

I Owned a Iphone XS Max 512Gb /* phone worked still perfect */
I Bought a Iphone 12 Pro Max 512Gb

Installed the new Iphone 12 by phone trasfer /*no restore from icloud backup*/
The proces went without a glitch .

Direct after the transfer i checked the total of Free space on my Iphone 12 to do a first
compare to see if it was near the Iphone XS Max. /* I am not near my Iphone XR Max at this moment */
My Iphone 12 Max Pro has Capacity=512Gb ; Available=65,73Gb
My Iphone XR Max has Capacity=512Gb ; Available=325Gb /*about these numbers, see comment above*/

Number of Fotos and Video's where the same on both phones Video's=3215 ; Foto's=39.775 /*arround these numbers*/

in Settings->General->Iphone-Storage /*sorry translated from the Dutch Language my phone is on*/
I saw that this large cunsumption of storage came from photo's and Video's and not from the other apps.

Is Iphone 12 making a FileTable-Copy (imaging) somewhere by mistake or forgets to remove this after file tranfer ??
I tried to lookup if i can find a way to see if the files count really have this ammount of Gb's used on the Iphone 12.
/*but luckely this is not possible with the phone :-)*/

Regards,
Wido


I have the same problem as well. The Other memory takes so much space to the point where it says “Iphone Storage Full.” and i only have like 5 apps which each one of them take up to 500 something MB. Thats really bad. I hate this problem and no one seems to know or apple tries to find a solution to this problem. It is so frustrating to see how much space that OTHER takes up. I have tried reporting this problem multiple times to different sources but it doesn’t help. I hope this issue figures it out by it self but what is the point in buying a phone that i dont know where that OTHER stuff goes and what even is it.

i have 20gb of others space on my phone. I talked with Apple support several times. Escalated, sent data engineers etc.

I have the e-mails.

Apple said they do not have to solve software problems in your device because under their warranty conditions they do not guarantee uninterrupted service.

therefore you do not have any right to do anything about others space which composed of number of undisclosed things you don’t know or change.

basically like battery scandal, they now come up with storage solution to push people to change their phones.

  • I think this is true. I only have 16 GB to begin with, and iOS and system storage make up 7/8ths of that capacity. Totally unusable

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So there is still no answer after over a year. What a disgrace Apple and it’s service are. Will be switching to Samsung right away. I suggest all Apple users do the same to avoid this scam. Apple operating system is a joke. Too many problems, they don’t have a clue how to fix their own issues which means their staff are untrained. They only care about taking your money and not about your experience. Just another huge corporation that doesn’t give a fk about it’s consumers, just their money. Change my mind Apple you useless cnts

Hey. I’ve come up with the solution. I had the issues with other data occupying more than 15gb on my iphone. So the trick is, you need to go to settings<safari<clear browsing history and data. And it clears that space. For me 14gb became 0kb. Like it clears all history, cache files, cookies and temporary data. This is the fix. 100% it’ll work. Have a great day!

  • I don’t know about 100% the solution for every single user. Bc this didn’t solve it for me. But I think there’s accidentally some truth to clearing data for some users. To be specific, anyone with this issue check your website advanced setting. You can do this by navigating to: -> settings -> safari -> advanced -> website data

    it’ll tell you exactly how much of that website data sitting idle is eating up your storage. For me, it’s not helpful as 50% of my available mem is still eaten by “other” despite website data at 30mb of my 64gb device. But it’s helpful to definitively cross that off the list.

  • Please don’t post any random solution with “100% it will work”, very misleading silly answer. Every google search result tells this answer, but doesn’t work always. I am stuck with 13 GB data stuck there, due to mail drop process failing thrice. The chat support exec just advised to me to factory reset the phone and restore from backup!

  • Terrible response. the person did not even red the forum and comes with the first solution that does not work. Somethig not proper is happening. THe worst think is that there is no transparancy/disclousure. Your phone states that there is a big amount of other data system, but you do not even know what that really is. Really bad programing and apple seems just not to care about it!

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I FOUND IT! Look here!!

I have struggled with this other memory on my wife’s iPhone for four months. We always thought it was pictures, iCloud storage, texts, etc… Today I sat down for several hours looking through and isolating apps after restore. YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE IT- A SleepWatch tracking app was taking up 35 GB of memory! Idk why it really doesn't show up in ' iPhone storage ' when you open the app but there it is!

I have attached a photo for reference or proof. If you are having this problem it has to be an application on your phone tracking too much detail. With a little process of elimination, you can find.

Just in case anyone else comes across this topic... My issue was that Other System Data was forever growing and taking up every little bit of space I had. Turns out for me it was the OneDrive app ....however under iPhone Storage apparently OneDrive was only using a few MB's?? Even when I went into the app it only showed a few MB's. I only have 9GB stored in OneDrive so not sure why it was taking up over 36GB on my device?? I had to use a third party app to check called iPhone Cleaner, did a quick scan and deleted the OneDrive app from my device ...I got my free space back!! =)

Also I'm on iOS15 using on 64GB iPhone SE (2nd Gen)

Post not yet marked as solved Up vote reply of iQue Down vote reply of iQue
  • iQue, can you please show me exactly which iphone cleaner you used ? there's so many in the app store ! I just got a brand new iphone 13 and theres 67GB of other system data that wasn't even in my last iphone. thanks !!

  • Which app cleaner did you used please ?

  • Which app is this, can you please tell us?

I am having the same problem. Just got and iPhone 13 and had an 8plus. The 8 plus was using 29.6gb and the new 13 is using 65??? And my 8 had Apple Music files downloaded, this new phone still has them all in the cloud. What is using double the space?

So I also had this problem where my 64 gb Iphone XS had 32 gb of system data and I tried deleting apps and checking documents of apps and using cleaners for iphone and clearing cache from apps but the thing that worked for me is restarting my iphone. After that firstly the sistem data droped like maybe 5 gb but after 10 minutes it’s at 11 gb. I hope this helps

I had a similar problem. I phone 13 Pro with 256 GB space. One fine day in the I Tunes app, showing as 80 GB remaining and rest of spaces consumed as OTHER category. However, In the mobile, I navigated through GENERAL > IPHONE STORAGE. The storage details are different to that in the phone. The spaces classified accurately.

For me podcast app was culprit’s. It was downloading all the episode of subscribed channel and filling up memory. I disabled auto download and deleted all downloaded episode.