iPhone storage keeps going back to full after deleting many things daily

I have an iPhone XR that the same thing is happening to. No matter what I delete the other storage keeps increasing. I did a factory reset a few weeks ago and my phone worked for a while but a few days ago it was completely full all of a sudden with over 40GB of other storage and it’s happening all over again.

I think either my phone is a lemon or there’s an app that’s taking up an abnormal amount of cache/storage. I really hope Apple helps with this as it makes it impossible to use my phone to even check email.

Hey guys — I found a solution. I backed up my phone on my computer and did a factory reset. It cleared up so much of my storage. I also added all my pictures to google photos and deleted them all from my photo album.

follow this link for the factory reset.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iphone/reset-iphone-3596892/%3famp

hope it helps!!

I have same problem. I deleted almost 50% of photos (25GB), app data, still 30GB data is used by other system data & 5gb is software data. I can't even see system data details? Are they collecting our data? Please help I have to constantly delete items to continue using my phone. This is extremely frustrating. I have attached images below.

You can’t buy storage for an iPhone; it will never have more than it had when you bought it. What you bought is iCloud storage, which is used for syncing data to other devices and for backing up. See→What's the difference between device storage and iCloud storage? - Apple Support

You will have to free up storage by deleting stuff. Start by going to Settings/General/iPhone Storage to look over what is taking up the most space, and what you can delete.

Other can be real data; see→What is "Other" and What Can I Do About I… - Apple Community. But it can also indicate storage corruption. If it is, you can back up your phone, then restore that backup, which will clear up storage corruption if that is the cause.

Hey guys, thank you for your replies. Appreciate your time and help. I did update my software and it did not work for me. Also I deleted and reinstalled applications, restarted my phone several times. I got the same issue. In fact other data storage keep increasing with activity.

I did a reset and recovered my iPhone with iCloud Drive disabled.

But now the Photos recovered from iCloud seems to take much more storage than in the iCloud (412.5gb vs 373.5gb)

How can this be?

How can it be that Apple still doesn't do anything about this issue? So many people reporting same issue but no solution for this error.

Like most of you, my iPhone 11 Pro 512gb got almost full even though I was keep deleting files. Suddenly the phone was restarting and got completely blocked.

Apple care guided me to erase it completely and recover everything through the iCloud backup.

In the end I listened to them and it took me 2 weeks to recover EVERYTHING from iCloud - 2 days ago it stopped from 'recovering' more data.

At the beginning of this 'recover from iCloud backup' process, thanks to some of your comments, I decided to disable iCloud Drive. I aimed to avoid my iPhone to try to 'recover' too many files and then to get an error that the recovery requires much more storage than the iPhone has.

(Maybe @gabzhd could try this too)

At the moment seems to be very low storage in 'Other' (let's hope this remains the same from now on).

One thing that surprised me is that now Photos & Videos in iCloud are 373.5gb BUT on my iPhone Photos & Videos are shown 412.5gb. 

How can this be?

How can it be that Apple still doesn't do anything about this issue? So many people reporting same issue but no solution for this error.

Anyone figure this out yet? My “other” section is taking up over half of my storage. I don’t use iCloud, don’t use Safari, hardly use any actual Apple Apps. I just switched back over from a Google Pixel because of how stupid iMessage is with any other device and I’m starting to regret it. Has anyone figured this out?

[Edited by Moderator]

After reading 6 pages of posts on this and because Apple support is not giving us a solution, Apple is up t its old tricks again. Last time it was the battery and now it is storage. They want us to buy a new phone with LARGER storage. I would give up the iPhone but I am too invested as all my devices are from APPLE. Shame Mr. Cook, Shame!

gavriel124 wrote:

hey,

did you find a solution for this problem?

Other can be real data; see→What is "Other" and What Can I Do About I… - Apple Community. But it can also indicate storage corruption. If it is, you can back up your phone, then restore that backup, which will clear up storage corruption if that is the cause.

Here is the solution—>Clear Other storage on your iPhone or iPad - Apple Support

I had the same issue, I have been able to solve it. Doing an iphone reset is not strong enough to clear the “others” sometimes.(for whatever reason that is I don’t know)

So this is what I did I backed up and restored my iPhone on iTunes and that was able to wipe the “others” from my storage.

1. Just run your iPhone on iTunes on your MacBook or windows device
2. Click on your iPhone
3. click restore iPhone
4. There will be an option telling you to back up before restore, if you have done that already just go to restore without back up
5. When you click on restore iPhone, iTunes will download the software needed to restore your iPhone; this will take a while, it took me like 4 to 5hours probably because of network issues. It may be less depending on how fast your internet is.
6. When it starts downloading don’t pause or move the phone till it’s finished
7. When it’s done the software will wipe your phone and restore it to factory reset and that will wipe the “other” storage problem

Ok, I looked more into my issue with photos and videos storage and the iPhone storage seems 'corrupted'

I checked the storage taken by Photos and it's shown on:

iPhone - 414gb

iCloud - 374gb

Macbook - 373 gb*

*I connected my iPhone to my Macbook to check the size of Photos & Videos on the iPhone and it shows 367gb but without including hidden folder 6gb

So Photos shown on iCloud (374gb) and also shown on my Macbook (373gb) is different than the one appearing on the iPhone (414gb).

Could be that the Shared Albums on iPhone take extra space? Even though these Photos & Videos are shared by me and all these already exist in the main Photos album? Meaning that same Photos & Videos take double space (even though they do exist on iCloud sharing)

Shared Albums contain 3848 photos and 1117 videos but I can't verify their size. I try to check on the Macbook but it simply remains: 'Calculating size..."

It's too obvious that there is a problem here!

I am surprised that Apple doesn't address this issue when so many people have same problem.

gabzhd do you also have Shared Albums?

Just to add: I did erase completely my iPhone about a month ago for the storage issue but even after full recovery from iCloud backup, I still have the SAME problem - the Photos on iPhone occupy more space than they should!

Photos & Videos on iCloud - 374gb

Photos & Videos shown by Macbook - 367gb

Hidden folder shown by Macbook - 6gb

Photos & Videos shown on iPhone - 414gb

It’s came back again !!

I did already two erase all contend and settings and restore from my backup, and after a few days it’s came back.

my other storage it’s completely full !! Why apple why !!!!!?????

@gavriel124 I’m not sure if it’s helpful for you, but a potential solution could be to disable “iCloud drive”

By this the size of “Other” - grey area on your storage print screen can be closer to zero - don’t know if it would work now when your iPhone is almost fully restored or when you restore it again.

I seen this tip mentioned by others and for me it might have worked - the “iCloud drive” didn’t matter much for me so I just kept it disabled. Since I fully recovered my iPhone the “Other” didn’t grow anymore - it remained low (a few gb).