[Jillstar]

Hi,
I've had my iPhone 5s for a couple of months now, but recently it told me I didn't have much storage left (my phone is a 16GB). When I connected it to my phone it said the majority of my storage 7.44GB is taken up by 'other'.
I use iTunes Match to listen to my music via wifi so I don't think my music should be taking up much space. I have updated my iPhone once since I bought it. I had an iPhone 4 before and it took longer than a couple of months for that to be full. My iPad also doesn't appear to have problems.
How do I go about getting more space and finding out what is taking up all this 'other' space?

[IslandNiles]

On your phone, go to Settings > General > Usage. You might have to wait a minute or so for the screen to load, but you'll then get a list of all the apps on your phone (including the stock apps like Music and Photos) with how much space they're taking up. The list will be arranged in order of size, with the apps taking up the most space at the top.

[Anika Hanson]

The only thing you can do is reset it and then restore from backup. It will free up all the missing space. I have this problem on my ipad mini and the only way I could get the space back was to to reset and then restore from backup.

[IslandNiles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anika Hanson

The only thing you can do is reset it and then restore from backup. It will free up all the missing space. I have this problem on my ipad mini and the only way I could get the space back was to to reset and then restore from backup.

It's not necessarily missing space though. I've known people to have several GBs in stored messages, for example. That shows up as 'other' in iTunes but on the phone itself you can see just how much space it's taking up.

[Jillstar]

Thanks for the replies. I have reset my phone and deleted all the data (I had backup of my contacts, apps, music etc. on my iCloud). That seems to have fixed it. I'm wondering if a lot of the 'other' data was texts, emails etc...? Is there a way of getting your phone to delete texts after a certain amount of time? I've looked and I haven't seen anything to do so.

[grumpyoldbat]

If you use something like Facebook messenger or Whatsapp and you use those to send and receive a bunch of photos, it would be very easy to build up a huge 'other' file quite easily.

[IslandNiles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jillstar

Thanks for the replies. I have reset my phone and deleted all the data (I had backup of my contacts, apps, music etc. on my iCloud). That seems to have fixed it. I'm wondering if a lot of the 'other' data was texts, emails etc...? Is there a way of getting your phone to delete texts after a certain amount of time? I've looked and I haven't seen anything to do so.

It won't delete texts automatically, but you can delete entire conversations just by swiping from right to left.

As I say, you can keep an eye on how much space apps are taking up in Settigs > General > Usage.

Annoyingly, there's no way to clear the cache of data from apps on iOS. But they can grow in size quite a lot beyond the initial app size. For example, Instagram on my phone is taking up 209MB. The app itself is only 19.7MB, and the rest is 'documents and data'. You can get a lot of space back by deleting and reinstalling the app.

[Anika Hanson]

Quote:

Originally Posted by IslandNiles

It won't delete texts automatically, but you can delete entire conversations just by swiping from right to left.

As I say, you can keep an eye on how much space apps are taking up in Settigs > General > Usage.

Annoyingly, there's no way to clear the cache of data from apps on iOS. But they can grow in size quite a lot beyond the initial app size. For example, Instagram on my phone is taking up 209MB. The app itself is only 19.7MB, and the rest is 'documents and data'. You can get a lot of space back by deleting and reinstalling the app.

It's quite annoying because you can easily clear he cache on android devices. I think it's an iOS7 thing because I never had this problem with iOS6.

[Three]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anika Hanson

It's quite annoying because you can easily clear he cache on android devices. I think it's an iOS7 thing because I never had this problem with iOS6.

This problem isn't new to iOS 7. Another problematic app is Facebook, it seems to cache a-lot of content and can easily build to 1GB+ of storage space use after a while. Delete the app and re-install to clear their caches is the only solution.

[IslandNiles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anika Hanson

It's quite annoying because you can easily clear he cache on android devices. I think it's an iOS7 thing because I never had this problem with iOS6.

Yeah I know. As usual, Apple like to keep things as simple as possible, and many users won't know anything about what it means to clear the cache or even how to check whether an app is taking up a lot of space (as shown in this thread, really). But that simplicity is a bit of an annoyance for people who know what they're doing.

Deleting and reinstalling the app only takes a minute, but obviously a 'clear cache' button like on Android devices would be preferable.