Synced Content iPhone Storage - iOS 17 Update

For the 2nd time, she's calling me back because of a poor phone connection. Unreal.

"Reaching out to engineering team because we are seeing this across the internet". They're gonna call me back tomorrow. Hopefully there will be a fix for this nonsense soon.

Has anyone found out how to get rid of the double up synched content on the new IOS 17?

Upgrading to 17.0.1 seems to have done it for me—although the challenge was first clearing enough space to accommodate the update.

Downloaded 17.02 but still have the annoying double up with synched content. Has blocked my whole phone. Painful

Interesting. Didn’t work for me

I’ve been having this issue too. I just turned off music sync so my Apple Music downloads are down to 1.66gb but the synced content is still 16.17gb. I did just get 20gb back but it should be more like 40GB.

I have a similar issue. In settings, analysis and improvements, I do not share information with Apple, but all files created by the iPhone, ips, remain in the phone and are not copied during synchronization. Apple doesn’t give me an answer.

Someone on another forum has noted:

One interesting thing I noticed: while this shows up as duplicates in the iPhone Storage page, you get the actual free space in General > About > Available.

Yep. That just confirms, in my case, I lost 6.6+GB of storage with this stupid Synced Content issue.

This discussion is also going on in the MacRumors forums. I spent a good deal of time with Apple support on this and this is what I found.

Initially, my Storage said I have 66.67GB of music on my phone from previously ripped content. It also showed 66.24 of Synced Content. The category under Synced Content is Photos at 58GB and then Gmail at 625MB. Here is a screen shot.

Tech support eventually said the Synced Content under storage was doing what it was supposed to do and was not doubling up on used storage. So I tried something.

I unsynced all my music via iTunes. The pic above showed the storage figures before I unsynced. Here is the comparison.

Before Unsynching:

256GB - Total storage

177GB - Total Used Storage

Music - 67.65GB storage

Synced Content - 66.24 storage

Other Storage Categories:

Photos Storage - 61.26

iOS (17.02) - 11.09

System Data - 11.52GB

So by my reckoning - and maybe I am wrong here - by deleting my music and thus deleting my synced content, I should have gained about 133GB of storage, right? 67GB (music) + 66GB (synched content) = approx. 133GB.

However, after unsynching, I only instead gained the amount of storage used by my music, 66.67GB and I now show 116GB used and 139.5GB free. The category synced content is no longer listed in my iPhone Storage section of settings.

After Unsyncing:

256GB - Total storage

116GB - Total Used Storage

Music - 0 GB as I unsynced Music

Synced Content - 0 GB as I unsynced Music and nothing else shows as synced.

Other Storage Categories:

Photos Storage - 61.26

iOS (17.02) - 11.09

System Data - 11.52GB

So, if the Synced Content was really being double counted, shouldn't I have been left with about 200GB of free storage out of the 256?

Maybe Apple was correct and the Synced Data category is not being counted against total storage.

If my thought process is wrong, please let me know. Thanks.

BTW, here is the screen shot of my storage AFTER unsyncing:

I tried a test. Using a Mini 6 with no music (or synced data storage with 17.0.2), I copied over 2GB of music using iMazing, not iTunes, and synced data now shows up, about equal to the downloaded music size. I then deleted the music on the iPad and it cleared the synced data.

sparksd -

Your test showed the same results as my test. I used iMazing as well. Problem on both an iPhone SE Gen 2 and iPod Air 4th Gen.

And it's only music that does this - photos and videos copied over the same way are not factored in.

It does appear that there are many of us all experiencing the same problem. It is the music that is the problem. Apple have not stepped up. No answers, no idea?? Having updated to 17.02 I had expected and hoped it would fix it, but no. Had to offload almost all apps to be able to get the update.

is this another Apple ply for everyone to buy the iPhone 15?

Hoping Apple will acknowledge and help

soon.