Voice Memos taking up storage and not deleting!

Hi Nad0o18,

Welcome to the Apple Community.

Seems the built-in "Voice Memos" App was once considered a necessary App on iPhone.

With iOS 14 and later you can delete some of the built-in Apple apps, including" Voice Memos"

Apple Support's article for iOS12

Edit or delete a recording in Voice Memos on iPad – Apple Support (AU)

Says:

Deleted recordings move to the Recently Deleted folder in the Voice Memos list, where they’re kept for 30 days by default.

To change how long deleted recordings are kept, go to Settings  > Voice Memos > Clear Deleted, then select an option.

To erase a recording in the Recently Deleted folder, swipe left on the recording, then tap Erase.

NB: After deleting multiple files ... you may need to turn off / turn on (restart) your iPhone to see the corrected storage amount

Hope this helps :-)

Contacted Apple and it seems to be a known bug.

May be a good idea to back up the Voice Memos (and anything else you wish to delete)

eg: to a computer, or an external device (eg jump drive)

Seems the Voice Memos will stay on iCloud as long as they are turned on in iPhone settings.

You cannot delete them completely from iPhone while they are turned on in iCloud.

How to optimise storage space on your iPhone:

How to check the storage on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch – Apple Support

(NB:That purple "Media" amount shown on the bar includes:

Music, videos, podcasts, ringtones, artwork as well as Voice Memos)

________________________________________________________

More info:

What's the difference between device storage and iCloud storage? - Apple Support

Manage your photo and video storage – Apple Support

Thank you for your reply and info., sponga.

Seems, if Apple knows about it, we'll see the issue addressed in a future update.

(We are all Apple users, like yourself, in this community, so Apple does not see / act on user-comments here.)

If you wish:

There's a web-page online for feedback to Apple.

Product Feedback - Apple

All the best :-)

Seems store visits are mainly for addressing hardware issues, somto48.

If it is a bug Apple knows about, as it seems to be,

Apple are likely working behind the scenes to fix this in future updates.

If you do decide to visit a store, having a reservation is a good idea:

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

All the b best :-)

hi El-Hennawy

that is correct after taking backup also it will show the same.

for me the goal was to be able to backup everything I had on my old phone, which I was able to do only after buying higher storage than what was occupied on my phone (excluding the faulty voice memo which shows up in TBs or GBs).

I had basic icloud 5GB which was full and my phone was taking up around 150GB for all apps & data and photos etc. I then upgraded my icloud to 200 GB plan to get iCloud take the backup of apps / data and pics, which took about 10 hours

once the back up in icloud was successful I restore it on my new phone.

after that i wiped off my old phone and did factory reset.

did you try upgrading to ios 15.6? here is what it says, not sure if that is related but just thought to share.

You're welcome :-)

OK.

Thank you for your observation.

So, hopefully, we may get to enjoy major improvements when the app is finally updated.

It may have been difficult for Apple to continue it's frequent updates / releases etc.

during the ups and downs, of the-past few years, ...

staff absences / illness / shortages etc. as experienced globally.

i'm also having this issue and looks like no solution yet from Apple yet. I see postings on web dates back to dec 2021, wondering if this is such a complicated one for Apple to take that long to release a fix.

I am having this issue as well. I downloaded 200+ voice memos to an external hard drive, deleted them from my phone, and cleared recently deleted. I also made sure that Voice Memos are not backing up to iCloud. My iPhone storage still shows 31.25 GB Voice Memos on the phone. Paradoxically, this is an increase of over 10GB - voice memo storage on the phone has actually gone up since I deleted two-thirds of what was there. I don't understand how this can be happening, especially when I have made sure they were moved to an external hard drive.

I should say, too: iOS is up to date (15.5) and I have repeatedly tried turning phone on and off again to see if it would clear/adjust. iCloud storage has gone down appropriately given all that I have deleted, but phone storage - and specifically voice memos - has not and has in face increased.

hassansli20, how did you achieve number 1 on your list? Like others here, that’s what I’m trying to do (delete the Voice Memos app, which is taking up far too much storage space on my little iPhone 6s — even more than before I deleted all memos from it). I just can’t get the app to delete, even though it shows the option to do so in storage.

Hi all, I have the same issue and I can't accordingly backup my phone and replace with a new one.

I deleted voice memos and deleted permenantly then deleted the app and restarted ofcourse in between every step but seems I can't get rid of it and prevents me now from backing up and transferring the data, as you can see it registers around 1 Tera or in some screens even 54 tera even though the phone is only 128Gb so I don't even understand what does that mean

But as you can see in some screens it shows that it’s 54Tbs and some others 40s Tbs. So I guess my issue will remain unsolved until apple fix something from their end because even after deleting the app and removing the data permanently still shows those errors.

Johnmir

I upgraded my plan only to get this backup and restore it to my new phone. after restoring to my new phone, I removed the iCloud backups and down graded to basic / free plan to only backup basic stuff like contacts or important apps which doesn't exceed 5GB

you can chose to take back up using iTunes on your PC on a regular basis or subscribe to iCloud storage plan.