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iPhone storage capacity - large "Other" category

Had 8GB of space taken up by 'Other' (the bar at the bottom of iTunes) and just did a full 'new phone' restore followed by a backup restore from iCloud. I also turned off PhotoStream. Other is now down to 900MB, which feels reasonable (I have quite a few documents on the phone, including iMovie and Garageband projects).


But how did it balloon to 8GB? That's about a third of the total capacity of my 32GB iPhone 5. My photostream should have been big, but not that big.


As near as I can tell it was some sort of temp file/buffer allotment, previously deleted projects and videos and photos were kind of caught in limbo. Apple needs to fix storage management for iOS, where it keeps space available if it's occupied by old, unwanted data.


Has anyone found a way of clearing Other and optimizing storage besides through restores and using third party file exploration utilities?


TL;DR - greatly reduced the size of 'Other' by doing a full restore then restoring from a backup.


I'll do an experiment and turn PhotoStream back on now, and see what happens in the next while.

Posted on Apr 27, 2013 1:32 PM

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iPhone storage capacity - large "Other" category

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