System data is taking up most of my iPhone storage

Backup your iPhone, then restore your iPhone from backup.

Back up iPhone - Apple Support

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

Well, I’m now stumped. You can try Apple Support (Get Support at the top of this page), but they will probably tell you the same thing I’m about to post.

Go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud and turn on switches to sync everything, and wait a while connected to Wi-Fi and plugged in for everything to sync. Then restore your phone to factory settings, don’t restore a backup, turn those switches back on, and reinstall all of your 3rd party apps from the App Store. Set up mail anew. This will recover most all data, except app data local on your iPhone only.

System data is just that; it is data needed by iOS. It would be unusual for it to take up post of your storage; perhaps your phone has storage corruption; if that is the reason you can restore your phone to a backup.

1. How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support
2. Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support - follow the instructions to restore using your computer, do not using Settings/General/Reset (which is not included in those instructions)
3. Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

I had to do a complete factory reset (erase all data, etc.) and the 3rd time was a charm. All okay now after restore from backup. Not sure why it this took 3 times but all good now.

Actually, I just discovered Twitter was taking up 98% of my storage.

Apple Podcast was the next highest offender.

I deleted the Twitter App completely —

My storage freed up almost 100%!

Then I re-downloaded it & my storage is still wide open —

I went from FULL down to 27GB!!!

Twitter was the culprit for me.

What about backing up the phone and restoring the backup?

And did you backup, restore to factory settings using your computer, then restore the backup, and not just erasing content and settings on the phone itself?

Since the last update, my phone is terrible. What if none of that works?? I’ve spent now over 10 hours messing with this phone. What’s the next step? Go buy a new phone again.. apple products don’t last anymore 👎

I am having this same issue. "Other System Data" is taking up 50GB. Phone is up to date on IOS revisions. All the steps noted have been performed multiple times including also clearing Safari cache etc..

Hi The_Behemoth, just want to know eventually did the problem solved?

I am having the same problem. So far I did the following steps

1). Iphone hard reset x 3 times. Result system data still there a lot.

2). Erase Iphone to a factory setting x 2 times (by using the phone itself ) and every time I did restore data from icloud which was taking 2 days each time. Result system data still there a lot.

3). Another erase Iphone to a factory setting x 2 times (by using Apple Store's Mcbook and my own Mcbook) and every time I did restore data from icloud which was taking 2 days each time. Result system data still there a lot.

4). Bought an icloud space for 2T

5). Went to Apple store multiple times to ask for the assistance.

6). Chat + Call with the Apple support multiple times.

still didn't work for me .... I am so so so so desperate

agideigo

Did you ever get this fixed? If so, what worked finally?

We have 2 ipads with the same issue. I feel like it is due to a certain app or several.

Whenever storage goes up, the system data eats more as well.

I did that twice.

Yes. In fact, I tried it both ways. First with just the back, reset to factory and then restore and the second time by erasing content.