How can I reduce the amount of document storage used by notes app with zero notes

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How can I reduce the amount of document storage used by notes app with zero notes

I noticed recently that my iPhone uses gigabytes of storage for documents for the notes app even though I have exactly zero notes on the phone. I know I have zero notes, because I used to keep everything in the cloud and recently had a problem with notes not updating reliably. As a trouble shooting step, I moved all the notes off the cloud and onto my laptop. Now iCloud shows exactly zero notes, and my phone shows zero notes. I then turned off notes synchronization to iCloud (on the phone), deleted the notes app, restarted the phone, re-installed the notes app, and ta-da it is using like 3.5 Gb of storage for documents and data. That's on the iPhone. On another iPad I have it's more like 20Mb of storage for zero notes. That seems like a lot of data to keep track of exactly nothing, but I'll live with it.

I have, of course, restarted the phone numerous times, removed and re-installed the notes app. And finally erased all phone data and set it up again from an iCloud backup. Currently the phone shows 3.79 GB of documents and data is being used for notes. (Did I mention that this is for exactly zero notes?)

Short of calling apple to have them tell me to re-do all of this is there any other trick anyone has used to remedy the situation?

iPhone 6s

Posted on Mar 5, 2023 9:53 AM

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Answer 1

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Chris Miner Author

Level 2

402 points

Mar 5, 2023 11:33 AM in response to Chris Miner

I may have a remedy. On a lark I simply deleted the app without turning off the icloud sync feature first. Normally that seems like a bad idea, because ... data. Since my notes are actually stashed on my laptop locally, they aren't deleted. Then I re-installed the notes app for the umpteenth time. Now I only see it using 1.5 MB of data. Still excessive, but way better than the flaming train crashing into a dumpster of 3.79 GB. (Aside: I remember when apple fans used to talk down on windows solutions involving restarting and reinstalling software) So sad....

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Answer 2

Chris Miner Author

Level 2

402 points

Mar 6, 2023 9:16 AM in response to Chris Miner

tl;dr: I'm still open to suggestions on a remedy...

Turns out my suspected remedy didn't help. Given time, the documents and storage used by the notes app climbed up into the 17 Gb range anyhow. Intuition tells me it is something very broken on how synchronization works between iCloud and Notes and unfortunately I don't have the level of access required to sort that out.

Would be interesting to see what kind of traffic goes back and forth. I say this because it also looks like the notes app never finishes synchronizing even though there is (almost) nothing to sync. I qualify with almost, because I did drag a single, seemingly innocuous note back onto iCloud from my laptop, and that may or may not have resulted in the burgeoning storage consumption on the phone. IDK

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How can I reduce the amount of document storage used by notes app with zero notes

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