Other Storage Taking Too Much Space

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