Why is 1TB of storage being used for health app?

Hi all - so a quick update for today. Somehow my photos widget has fixed itself and so has my activity tracker! Now, I'm not someone who believes in magic, but I'm completely stumped how this can be... i.e how a piece of technology can go from having issues for hours and then just sort them itself, I'll never know. I've not updated anything (as there's no updates to apply) so I can only assume it was slowly rebuilding itself all afternoon / evening following the many resets! Either way, whilst not painless, there is a solution for those who want to try it - if you following the link Shawy posted, or just phone Apple Support, they should be able to help. I'm going to try my sleep tracking app tonight and also monitor the battery during the day, as these were my final issues.

Thanks to you all for the posts - it's been somewhat comforting to know I'm not the only person experiencing these issues. I wish all of you luck that still have these problems, and if there's anything I can do, or any questions I'm able to answer, then please let me know.

To follow up on Shaft80 and Shawy’s posts... I just completed the steps in Shawy’s link (in a nutshell: unpair watch, run iPhone backup, erase iPhone, restore iPhone from backup) and it MAY have worked. I’m currently not showing the 1.61TB of Health data in my iPhone storage BUT, if you open the Health app, it looks like it’s still loading my Health data, so we’ll see. I’ll let this continue restoring/reinstalling everything overnight and report back in the morning. 🤞

(My watch is still unpaired and I’m going to wait to re-pair it until I can confirm that the restored iPhone alone is working as expected without the TB of Heath junk.)

I also chatted with Apple Support before this just to add my ticket to the (hopefully long) list of people experiencing this problem. Here’s hoping they figure out a fix before thousands of people try setting up their new iPhone 12s from backups that haven’t run for awhile.

I believe this whole issue has something to do with the Apple Watch, but the multiple watches issue has been here for a long time. When your watch records data to health, it sometimes randomly does it as another watch.

It’s actually not random. Any time you restore an iPhone or restore an  Watch it pairs as a new watch. It keeps the previous incarnations because each previous pairing reported data to the health app and is the primary source of the data accumulated when that was the actively connected watch instance.

I am also having this issue. Mine say 1.61TB. I started a chat support and the support agent asked if I cared about the health data and just to delete it. Seems kinda odd. Do I care about my blood pressure records for the last year. I guess not if it’s okay.

anyway I went a head and deleted all the health data. There were a lot of my old devices and a bunch of copies of devices. Some said error if I tried to delete them. Eventually after a few restart I managed to delete everything.

but it still shows 1.61TB.

I assume they will want me to restore my iPhone and watch. Baaah. That’s always the next step. Oh just wipe your device and wast a bunch of time trying to fix an issue.

ill keep you updated.

It's not random in terms of adding more Health data, but the space that's being reported is way off. I too have this issue, and oddly enough, my iPhone 11 Pro is also reporting the very same 1.61TB number for health data. Which also blocks me from being able to perform an iTunes backup, despite the fact that my 512GB model only occupies 270GB, and I have roughly 1.3TB free on my Windows 10 laptop with which to save it all. This is very frustrating.

Update 10/14: 1.61TB of Health data still gone after following the backup and restore process from Shawy's link. It's siting at a more realistic 797MB now.

Going to re-pair the Apple Watch tomorrow and see if things stay the same.

I was also recommended to delete health data, I still have 8,36 PB of data and i lost my health data (not like I care about them at this point, but if it does not work don't recommend people to do it.)

That doesn't help me... I don't have a 2TB iCloud account, nor massive bandwidth to save my stuff. Nor do I want to delete my health data. I have conditions for which I need to save that information.

I did not run into any issues backing up my phone to iCloud. The total data used was 50GB for my phone. While it showed 1.61TB it was not actually filling the file system to the max.

Note I do have 2TB iCloud space. Not sure if that helped.

I just noticed I had the same issue on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. I'm on IOS 14.0.1 & my Health app is reading 1.61 TB. I know this doesn't help much as far as a resolution but I'm hoping its a glitch that will be fixed with the next update. Strange how it reads the same amount of space for multiple people.

This is my opinion:

That may have been helpful. I think it first checks your ICloud space and it should be bigger than your known file system size (2 TB > 1.6 TB). Then it starts to backup and sees nothing in that 1.6 TB space, and not backs up. But that check fails at the start for me since there isn't a 8 PB plan for ICloud.

Update finished, unfortunately the issue hasn’t resolved. Still got that 8,36 PB of data. Though my WhatsApp issue seems to be resolved. It know opens and works fine. Meaning that I can finally use my phone.(previously I was using my old 5s on IOS 12) I guess I might live with it.( no backups ain’t good though)

If you'd ask me it's totally safe to update, Iphones generally don't brick while updating. But the update doesn't fix anything so you may as well not update

(I also backup my phone before updating, just in case, it is a good habit and saved me once on windows.)

Hi User_782,

My guess would be that Apple feel they have fixed the issue now, as some of us have been able to get our Health App back to normal by reinstalling - I know this doesn't necessarily help you if you're unable to back-up your phone, however, I can tell you what I did just in case it helps.

There was a post a while ago on this thread that suggested removing the encryption of the back-up which means the Health App isn't included, this should allow you to back-up your phone to either your PC or Mac. You can then do a manual back-up of WhatsApp (something I didn't do which is why I lost some data). In theory, if you're issue is like mine, you can then unpair your Watch (which should back it up to the phone) then back up to your Mac/PC and then erase everything (which is the scary part). When you reinstall from a previous back-up, you should find that the Health issue is fixed and that everything has been saved. I didn't lose any Health Data, which I found surprising as that wasn't included in my back-up to my Mac.

I obviously cannot guarantee that this will work for you, and I'd always advise phoning the support team and get someone (who isn't on first line) to guide you through this. I hope it works for you, as it did for me, as I feel your pain on this issue. Again, I might be wrong, but I cannot see Apple releasing an update that will correct this as they have a solution in place now (not that it's an ideal solution).

If you try it, then good luck mate.