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
Answered by MacGiver in 646662022
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!

The solution is to sign out from your apple ID, then let it delete the system data attached with the apple ID, dont worry, you wont lose any data, just sign out and sign in. It will free up your storage from storage data

i went from this

to this

I have the same problem, I have a iPhone XR, with 64gb of less than one year old. The other storage is 37Gb big, the memory is completely full, can’t even open my mail. I have offloaded almost all apps. It seemed that with offloading the problem got worse… One month ago I had the same. A reset reduced other storage to 5gb, but I am not looking forward to a reset every month. Yesterday, the other storage was 36gb, today already added another 1gb. It is really unacceptable. Apple support only suggest a factory reset. My old iPhone SE with 16gb is even more useful than this phone!!

Oh wow!!! I was having the same issues on my iPhone X(64GB). I have tried everything to delete the system data which takes up (33.4GB) of my iPhone storage making all my used storage to be (54.4GB) of (64GB), but i still end up with the same amounts of GB taken by the system data.I finally got a solution to it and I couldn’t be more happier right now. What I did was to check and confirm truly if the apps on my phone took the storage displayed by apple in my iphone storage. Truly everything was correct but I decided to delete my VOICE MEMO APP which document and data was (3.3MB) but when I checked the VOICE MEMO APP, I couldn’t find any data or files in the app which resulted to deletion of the VOICE MEMO APP. To my greatest surprise, my data storage which was initially (33GB) reduced to (6.29GB). I couldn’t believe it until I restarted my phone and checked again, I got the same (6.29GB) that the system data reduced to. Well, If I’m to bring up a suggestion, I think one of the apps already installed on iPhone is causing the problem. Just try to check and delete anyone of the already installed apps on your phone by apple. When you delete one of the apps and still get the same problem, I’ll suggest you move on to the next already installed apps until you finally find the one taking up the space. I really hope this will help someone out there looking for how to get rid of the huge iPhone storage taken by the system data. ✌️

what I am ment to do? This is absolutely ridiculous

im sorry if this answer is late for you but i think i have found a legitimate solution which is rather simple AF. this worked for me but im not sure if it will work for everyone.

download itunes app on your computer, plug your phone into the pc, and follow the prompts like “trust this device”, etc.

click the small iphone icon usually located on the top left.

then simply hit on “sync” which should be located on the bottom right. this takes a few moments.

as soon as i hit “sync”, the system storage on my new phone went down by 25 gb instantly. i hope this works for everyone here as its very annoying to begin with.

Same issue. I noticed all that space used to be taken by Photos and Videos. When i disconnected photos it didn’t free up space, rather all of that turned gray to system used data. This is ridiculous.

reconnecting iPhoto, now it shows 2gb photos, and nearly everything else is taken by system. What gives??

deleting voice memo app didn’t work for me

Currently System files takes up 65GB

This is not acceptable!!

I had a similar problem. I phone XR with 64 GB of space. On the iPhone Store menu, there has a space of 30 GB. But iPhone always showed a message that is running out of memory. When someone calls me through Whatsapp, I can't pick up the call and the call suddenly dropped. When I access the photo, the quality of the picture will be reduced, and I can't take a picture with the error message that iPhone running out the space.

Every time open Whatsapp, the apps only can be accessed for a few seconds then off.

Does someone here have the solutions?

Same issue here. I just recently purchased a 13 Pro. I received a notification last week saying - I’m out of Data! As I look at my storage, I have more than 33GB being used by “Other System Data.” I’ve attempted multiple times to clear the system with only barely minimal changes. What the HECK is going on???

I just solved this issue for my ipad last night. I had 120gb of used space on my ipad and my apple music was displaying on ipad storage that it was using 4gb of data but when I uninstalled apple music, my storage went down to 74 gb used. Thats almost 50gb just from apple music even though I didn't download one single song. It was all hidden cache.

Delete the Voice memo App !

'Others' taking ~230 GB/256 gb . Aready running ios 15.6. I'm seriously distressed now - this is a new phone and I failed data transfer uncountable times - until I finally hit the underlying issue - this 'others' space. Already spent unlimited nighs over this last whole month and my new phone (iphone 13) remains practically unusable. Any fresh tips ? Please help . I'm totally at my wits end.

I also have this problem. I've deleted all of the apps that I can possibly live without. I've tried all of the usual suggested fixes that I've found. Still, more and more space is consumed by system data.

64GB iPhone XR. 32.43GB currently consumed by system data, 8.4GB used by iOS. Constantly hitting the wall with "Storage full" messages.

So desperate that I'm considering switching to Android for the first time ever. Obviously after this experience I'm looking to get a phone with a micro SD card slot.

ikr i'm acc so close to throwing my phone out of a window 😭😭

I too have the same problem. I just got an iPhone 8+ 256gb and a few hours after setting it up my storage was more than half full. I haven’t used it much so I’m puzzled as to why the system data is over 120gb. If anyone has a solution or finds someone who’s mentioned a working one please alert me.

Hi everyone.

I’ve got a new iPhone 14 pro 512GB and recognized after mirroring my old iPhone that the System Data took about 220GB space of storage. So I tried it with a restart and it helped. For one or two days. Then I checked the storage values again and the ominous System Data increased up to over 200 GB again.

Safari Website Data is about 50MB. Not that much.

For me it seems that some process(es) caches a lot of data, or it’s another bug in iOS.

So, a restart of the iPhone works, for me, temporarily. Maybe for some of you folks too.

Good luck

Thanks for posting about it. I tried many if not all of the suggestions in this chain. What worked for me in the end was connecting to iTunes and doing the factory reset NOT via the settings in the iPad, but rather by selecting "restoring iPhone/iPad" within iTunes. This is found in the first box on the device summary page of iTunes once your device is connected - right corner next to the "check for update" button. I of course made a backup first (I chose to the computer). ALSO, iTunes will tell you, but you also have to turn off the "Find My iPhone/iPad" app before you can do this. You can turn this back on once reinstalled. It completely reset the system data for the device. I did have to set up the iPad as a new device without transferring data (TEMPORARILY) in order to update the software to the latest version. Then I did another factory reset using the iPad settings this time (under "General", "Transfer or Reset iPhone", "erase all content and settings". To be sure, I once again turned off "Find My iPhone/IPad" before doing the factory reset this way. In the end, system data was back to normal at factory reset levels. I turned back on the "Find my iPhone/iPad". Hope this helps!

I had the same issue when moving from an iPhone 12 Pro Max to the iPhone 13 Pro Max. On top of the continually running out of storage space because “Other System Data” would go up to 60GB apps seemed to get kicked out of ram a lot more often than on the 12 Pro Max.

I finally found out what was causing it.

I went into the music app and went into the Library tab. Then click on the Downloaded menu option. In there was another menu option that was called Downloading or something and it had the busy sign on it and some films and tv programs were showing for some reason. I cancelled / deleted them all and since then no more issues. Storage is back under control and apps aren’t being kicked out of ram.

Maybe this is the reason some other users are having this issue.

I just set up a brand new 64 GB iPad today. I didnt sync my photos and apps. Just added several apps I thought I'd use. I checked my storage to make sure I didn't add too may apps. 34 GB of systam data was taking up space. After updating to iOS 16.1.1 my system data went down to 8GB.

I see the same issue in iOS 16.1.1, others storage is growing and what I detected is this:

  1. Use any third party app like camera recording or telegram, or other where you can create large files.
  2. Delete the files from the Apple Files app.
  3. Empty the Trash.
  4. The deleted space still appears in Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage as Others...

Anybody could reproduce it?

hey! so i had the exact same problem here, i knoe this question was from awhile ago but if anyone else has this problem now maybe try this. i am using my old iphone 6😀 for my music because trust me i have a lot and my phone now can’t hold all the storage it takes up (like 27 gb) anyways i recently signed into icloud and everything onto the phone, deleted everything but apple music and i went to look at why my songs weren’t downloading system storable was taking up ALL my storage, ***, i deleted everything how could this be possible, i searched for an answer nothing worked, and so i was like, well let’s sign out of icloud f it let’s see, and magically it took away all the system storage, so try restarting phone if that doesn’t work, sign out of icloud and sign back in, i never signed back in because i’m just using the phone for music but. hope this helps

i have been an Apple iOS user since 2009. Apple has intentionally left out the methods to allow customers to clear their Documents and Data (aka Application temp space) to force their phones to bloat. once the bloating for all applications is large enough it forces the customers to buy ICloud membership and subscriptions is the new ways for online money grab. Or it forces the customers to buy new phones with larger memory which charge 60% higher for same amount of memory in the retail parts market. the only wait to clear your applications temp space is to delete the application and re-install it from the App Store. If your application has native option for savings it’s native data, settings and archived content inside its profile cloud account then your app will function as normal. If not, May God be with you. Apple will not allow you to delete the temp space area in the past, now or future - since it feels it’s “too risky”

Had about 10Gig of mp3 files on my iPhone 13. After deleting the Music app, Other Storage increased by 10Gig.

Hi, i went from 8+ 256gb (most of storage used) to 14+ 512gb. Transferred data no problem then got notification that storage was almost full. When I checked, system data was taking up 470gb!! Thought it must be a mistake, I shut down the phone via settings-general and when I switched it back on, system data took up 63gb.. weird

Other Storage Taking Too Much Space
 
 
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