Synced Content iPhone Storage - iOS 17 Update

To show there was a problem that has been fixed. First screenshot is from iOS 17.0.2. Clearly the memory for synced music was encumbering twice the memory of the actual music size. I couldn’t upgrade the iOS without deleting severs gbytes of music due to an out of memory error

after upgrading to iOS 17.2, the assignment of memory duplication error has been corrected. I don’t have as much music on my iPhone now so the amount of memory isn’t important but iOS is clearly no longer assigning memory to all my music “documents “ twice.

Here’s the details on memory use assigned to the music app. Note that synced music is no longer encumbering the memory assigned to music documents and also encumbering memory as synced content. It is now only assigned to the synced content memory allocation.

I just updated to 17.2.1 and synced content is still taking up 17GB of the phone memory.

I feel your pain, it is so annoying

I have iOS 17.3 and this is still an issue. My 256GB iPhone 14 Pro has 192.72GB of Synced Media. Kind of defeats the purpose of buying a 256GB iPhone.

Apple is moving too slow for me on this issue, it never should’ve happened in the first place. I will be switching to an Android phone soon, problem solved!!

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.

share3141 wrote:

I did a little more research.

I was also told by Apple Support that "Synced Content" did not contain any duplicate media files.

So I deleted my entire music collection on my iPad.

Both Music and Synced Content dropped to 0 byte usage.

I got back over 12+GB of storage.

Then I download, via a USB, all of my songs to my iPad - about 6.2GB

Lo and behold, both Music and Synced Content were 6.2 GB for a total of about 12+ GB.

Are you using either iTunes Match, or the Sync Library feature that is available with an Apple Music subscription?

If you were not doing any kind of syncing like that, then all of the songs that you downloaded into your iPhone's Music Library (using iTunes or Finder) would count against device storage, but none of them would logically be part of Synced Content (if Syncing referred only to iTunes Match / Apple Music / iCloud).

Theres something really strange going on. I have a ton of downloaded music in my itunes/"Music" app from throughout the years, mostly pre streaming.

I think I had about 40-60GB of music. I honestly dont remember the exact figure.

My macbook storage says I have 40GB of music files overall

My music app says I have 158GB of music on it (???)

My iPhone storage, after the ios 17 update, says I have 72GB of music and 40GB of "synced content"

What in the actual F is going on ?

Quick update. I turned off the "sync library" option on the Music app, and it went from 158GB to 40GB. That is more in line with how much of my own personal music files I have. I guess the rest was stuff from apple music ? Even that doesn't make sense as I dont use apple music often and dont actually download stuff that I add to my library.

I backed up my 14Pro after updating the ios and I hope this storage problem doesn't transfer to my 15. Its in the process of restoring now. The back up and now restore process took unusually long and Im wondering if its because of the extra junk in the backup.

Im afraid after this restore, there will still be a ton of "documents and data" junk. The 14 is currently sitting at 242GB of "documents and data", which is what I had to do a backup off. If the 15 has anywhere near that after the restore idk what to do

I had 16 GB free on my iPhone and no iTunes music synced.

Then I synced 8 GB of iTunes music and now I have 8 GB free on my iPhone and 8 GB as "Music" + 8 GB as "Synced Content".

It's obvious that the 8 GB of "Synced Content" is not occupying real space on my iPhone, it's just a strange way Apple has to tell you that 8 GB of the storage is of synced content, in my case already classified as iTunes music.

Very confusing but not really using additional storage.

Do the test :-)

I did do the test.

I deleted the files in Music and both the storage allocation for Music and Synced Content went to zero and the total available storage available increased by the sum of those two categories.

When I re-installed my music files both Music and Synced Content reported almost identical amounts and my available storage decreased by the sum of those two categories.

Are you suggesting that the summary numbers displayed are incorrect or misstated and we need to subtract the amount of memory shown in "Synced Content" from storage available to arrive at a true measure of storage available used?

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 think you are correct. That is what I finally figured out on my iPhone. In my case the graph is wrong, but the amount displayed is closer to what I expect. The Synced Content displayed just confuses the issue.

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?