Synced Content iPhone Storage - iOS 17 Update

So... an update. I was having all kinds of issues with my phone ( besides the 'Synced Content' issue ) so I did a full reset and restored from my last backup. All the music I'd synced from iTunes was gone ( as expected ). There was no 'Synced Content' after doing this. I just synced a bunch of music ( 15.55 GB ) from iTunes and sure enough there is now Synced Content of 14.48 f'ingGB.

WTF Apple?

I have a brand new fully updated iPhone 15 Pro Max. I synced 60 GB of music with over 7,000 songs. I checked Storage and it showed 60 GB Music and 60 GB Synced Content. I tried to delete the music which also cleared the synced content. Now the phone thinks the music is synced and it isn't. I have all my space back, but very little of my music library. I have a few purchased songs from Apple and none of the 7000 songs are on my phone. I try to sync, it runs a few seconds and does nothing.

It is taking up 60 GB on my new iPhone 15 Pro Max. My music is also 60 GB. Remove the music and the synced content goes away so it is obviously duplicate data. But I can't delete it.

I was able to force a sync again by Selecting the iPhone in iTunes. Select Music on the left. I Selected the "Selected Playlists..." option, but I did not select any songs. Itunes crunched for a few minutes. I then did the same thing, but selected Entire Music Library. The phone is syncing. The Synced content folder is growing at the same pace as the music library so instead of using 60 GB it will use 120 GB. I am hoping this is just temporary data which will be removed at some point; if not this is a big problem.

I have done a complete reset of phone as suggested by apple support who said they weren't aware of any issues, and it has made no difference.

I am still getting synced content in storage which seems to be a duplication of my music files which means I do not have enough storage on my

phone to sync with iTunes on pc.

SE2020 photo shows storage used on old phone using ios 16.7.

IPHONE 15 PRO photo shows storage on new phone using ios 17.0.2

– you can see the extra storage being used by the “synced content”

My new phone was set up by transferring from old phone at

initial set up.

The issue was first noticed when I wanted to sync my new phone

to iTunes on pc but it cannot due to lack of storage, even though there should

be plenty of storage required.

I tried emailing these details to apple but it bounced back that it isn't monitored, so I will call apple again to ask when they will fix this important issue.

First time i have bought a new iphone at launch and I am beginning to regret it - should have waited for the bugs to be fixed first.

very frustrating that apple don't test their software in the real world, including syncing to itunes on a pc !!

Today I received a call from senior apple support.

He has confirmed that they have raised the importance of this issue and the software engineers are working on a software update. He doesn't have a timescale yet but will keep me informed of when the update is due for release.

Feb 1, 2024 and same problem here on iPhone 11, even with 17.3 update.

I have a 64 GB phone with 20.56 GB of "synced media". It is clearly duplicating my music. In "iPhone Storage" Music lists 1.02 GB of storage being used but when you then click on it, it shows 20.56 GB of "All Songs", which is accurate since I have a lot of music. Synced Media appears to be duplicating that exact number.

Interesting to note that the storage graph at the top of the iPhone storage graph shows that 20.56 GB of Synced Media and roughly the same amount being used by "Applications". My storage is filling up once a week and I have to constantly manage it. Very annoying!!! Waiting for a fix.........

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

Is your music from Apple or downloaded? I have 16GB of music, all downloaded from ripped CDs, and it doesn't show any music in the storage listing, just the sync data. And did you try a full restart?

I lost 6.6GB on my iPhone and on my iPad. I can't find any explanation on any forum.

It appears to have something to d with multimedia and a computer.

Don't know how to reduce or eliminate it.

Don't know where it came from in the first place.

I don't want to have to reset my devices and hope it goes away.

It looks like a deal to sell more hardware as far as I am concerned.

Really angry about this as I try to manage my storage carefully.

Same issue here. My synced content takes up additional ~60GB now interestingly enough my music copied from my PC is in the same size category. 

iOS 17.0.1 did not fix this and apparently this exact problem is already known in earlier iOS 17 versions. (Apparently the reply gets auto deleted when you mention the public be*a)

I talked to Apple Support. They told me it was simply a "reclassification" as to how storage was used. That is, the category called "system info" was split out and much of the information was now displayed in "synced content". That made no sense to me as the overall storage usage on the device went up. In my case, 6.6 GB. If it was split you would expect the total storage consumption to remain the same. When presented with that question answers became very vague. In short, I don't think customer support understands the issue either.

So this issue of "Synced Content" appears to be a shared experience.

The question is why was this invented? It might make sense if you are a

subsciber to Apple Music although I'm not sure how. But if you are

managing your own music library what purpose does it serve? I can't

believe someone made a "mistake" putting this feature in. This is a

pretty big mistake. Why would you double count your music files? I've

read this feature has been present during b**a as well. It sounds like

this is by design.

How do we raise this issue to the powers that

be? IMO, this should be removed for those music files that are managed

externally and not part of Apple Music. It worked this way, as far as I

know, on earlier production releases of ios. And why all the obscurity surrounding

it? Apple support seems to be in the dark - at least based on the three

people I've talked to.

Wrong. It impacted my iPad mini update last night because now I didn’t have enough room to do the update. Had to spend a half hour deleting a bunch of files to make space since the double-count sync files took 12gb of my spare storage.

I checked again today. Storage shows 94 GB used of 256 GB. My music collection is 61 GB, and Synced content is 61 GB. If I multiply 61 GB by 2 then I get 122 GB. It appears maybe the synced content is just showing where it came from. In my case it seems the graph at the top is showing what appears to be duplicate wasted space, but the phone isn't really using 122 GB for my music.

I have seen posts that the data is not duplicated but just counted twice. The issue I ran into was that the total usage was impacted such that my phone did not have enough space to upgrade to 17.0.1. I had to delete music to get the room. Also, this does not seem to happen in version 17 of the iPad OS, where I have synced content. That category does not exist. What is different?