Synced Content iPhone Storage - iOS 17 Update

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.

So...either Apple Support lied or they really don't know anything about the new storage category called "Synced Cotent".

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and presume they are uninformed.

The larger question is why the developers of ios 17 decided to penalize Apple users who seek to manage their own media by double counting and unecessarily using resources.

I can come up with no technical reason why this is so since this "feature" did not exist prior to ios 17.

I also ran the same test on my iPhone with the same result.

My iPhone is an older model and I've been contemplating a new device.

However, I am reluctant to be forced into buying a device with more storage than I actually need simply to accomodate an apparent flaw in ios 17.

So I'm looking at Android for the phone or possibly a separate song player device for use when I travel and delete my songs from the iPhone.

I'll keep the iPad and live with the impact because I don't add a lot of apps to it. I use it mostly for browsing and reading.

Really not a nice tactic - especially undocumented and leaving your support associates having to take the brunt of the criticism.

Mine was escalated also. Apple said its normal behavior and was not taking up extra storage. So I ran a test. For me, I had 66GB of synced music AND 67GB of Synced Content showing in storage. When I unsynced the music, I gained 66GB of storage back. The Synced Content category disappeared. But I did not recover 122GB of cleared storage, which I should have recovered if Synced Content was actually taking up space. Since I only recovered 66GB, it shows that Synced Content is not actually taking up space. It's just a category. See my screen shots from above.

As I said, it was a dumb and confusing way for Apple to show this Synced Content. Not sure why they needed to show it at all. But if you don't believe me, try it for yourself. Unsync your music and see what happens.

I understand. But if you delete the 30GB of music, the synced content category should go away and you will only recover 30GB for the music. You will not recover 60GB for the music (30GB) + Synced Content (30GB). Synced Content is just reporting how much data (i.e. music) you have synced. It shows it in the storage bar (which unfortunately is very misleading). But it's not taking additional storage.

fabrica64 wrote:

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 :-)

You're right, it's a display bug showing the same count in two different headers. One of the two entries is likely to be a virtual pointer (reference) to the real one, rather like a screen icon or shortcut is not the real app.

Bug reports should be submitted direct to Apple's team using the Feedback pages. The developers don't read here so it has to go by the official route.

Feedback - Watch - Apple

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:

This seems to have worked for me:

• full backup to iCloud
• erase all content and settings
• upgrade to 17.0.3
• restore from iCloud

After this, my sync content is almost exactly the size of my music library and the 'music' content is only 1.9G. I don't understand why music is anything different than 'sync content' but I have over 30G of music. System data stayed somewhat constant (went up a little). I got back about 10G of storage by doing this.

Mike

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).

As I stated above, I do not believe that Synced Content is actually using additional storage. It is only showing how much music (for the most part) you have synced from a computer to the phone (whether by iTunes or another program). In my test I deleted my synced music. The synced content category disappeared. It synced content was actually using storage I should have recovered the GB used by music and the GB used by synced content. However, I only gained the GB used by music. Thus, Synced Content is not actually using storage.

It's a dumb way to showing us we have synced content, but it not taking up space.

So if your phone is telling you that you do not have enough storage to install iOS 17.X.X, it likely because of something else taking up storage, not Synced Content.

If you subscribe to Apple One or Music, it will attempt to identify which of your stored songs on your phone have an exact (or higher quality) version of the song in the Music catalog in the cloud and will identify it as "Synced content". It's just a reclassification from the old Music storage total into unsynced Music storage plus Synced (Music) content. It does this so that you can stream the synced music content on your other devices that don't have the music stored locally. If you don't want to stream your music that's stored on the phone when you're using a different device that doesn't have have it stored, then try turning off the "Sync Library" option in the Setting > Music app.

Hello all. I have had this same issue, which I feel is now resolved for me, actually, its just 'explained' really, I suggest there is no 'issue' I think its just that Apple must have changed their labelling of the memory allocation on the iPad during one of the mysterious software updates and (I dont think) its that clear. So I'm hoping to summarise - in an attempt that it explains / helps...

As I said, I had this 'issue' - a huge chunk of unexplained memory use - 17gb of my 64gb - on my iPad, called 'Synced content' (red colour) that I could see 'in addition' to photos (yellow*) and Music (green). Which made me think duplication was occurring - madness!

See attached screenshot.

*Here's the first point - I thought that the photos memory use was actually orange in colour which was in fact 'Applications', the difference in colour isn't that much if you are not paying attention (clearly I wasn't!)

Anyway, it turns out that the green, music section IS NOT the music that I had put on my iPad from my Mac. That is actually (in) the synced content. I proved this by unticking the 'sync music' when my iPad was connected to Mac and then syncing - hence removing my music from the iPad. The synced data disappeared - or almost completely did - I cant exactly remember.

(Of course I then re ticked the box and put my music back on my iPad , but it proved the point)

The green 'music' memory use is in fact music that has come from other sources - in my case this is Spotify music that I have downloaded. Your music from Mac ('iTunes' if you like for old school thinkers) is within the 'Synced content'

So my confusion was caused by two things really

1. Being relatively new to this idea of being able to have Spotify music offline (ie download it). In the past, I never had any memory use in that way
2. I think the 'synced content' label is 'new'. (Though I may be wrong).

But the above two factors meant I leapt to the conclusion, unfairly that there was wasted / duplicated storage on my iPad. When quite frankly there wasn't at all.

I dont know if that helps anyone, but if I had seen this myself before, I feel it would have explained the situation quite simply and allayed my concerns.

Hope it helps

(PS I should add, that as my iPad was within warranty, I got 'help' from Apple. Using the Apple Support icon. At first I spoke to what I think may be called 'The iPad team' who, quite honestly weren't able to help and explain at all! They just caused more confusion! The issue was escalated and I had a call back and eventually spoke to a guy called Seamus from what you might call the 'proper Apple team' who was brilliant - and gradually got to the root of the confusion. So credit to him!)

I just fixed my issue.

I constantly transfer music from my computer to my phone. Last week, my synced media said 19GB which is the accurate amount of music I have synced from my laptop. Yesterday I did a lot of editing on my music files so I wanted to delete all the music on my phone and do a fresh sync. On my phone, I went into Settings - Music - Dowloaded Music - Edit - Delete all songs. I then connected to my laptop, made sure all my MP3 files were in the music app, then went into finder and clicked on sync. When it was done, I checked my iPhone storage and it said synced media was close to 35GB. It seemed as though there was duplicated somewhere.

The issue was that I had imported my downloaded local files into Spotify.

Spotify has this feature where u can import your downloaded (iTunes/Synced music) into the Spotify app. I had this enabled (I never really used it) so you can play your Spotify music and downloaded synced music all in the same app. I think this was causing the duplicates. I went on my phone into Spotify - top left profile button - settings and privacy - local files - and disabled show audio files from this device. I also went to the extent of deleting and re-downloading Spotify on my phone just for extra measure. I then put my phone to charge overnight and when I woke up, the synced media category went from 35GB yesterday, back down to the normal 19GB today. I am not sure if the Spotify issue was the real culprit but it is worth a shot.

My wife's iPhone 11 Pro 128GB had the same problem after upgrading to IOS 17. She picked up a whopping 60GB of "synced media" which meant she couldn't update to 17.4.1 because of lack of space on her phone and also whe wasn't able to back her phone up to her MBA because she kept getting false message that the MBA didn't have enough space which it did, when previously she had 60GB free. The Genius at our local Apple store had no idea of what to do about it either. After lots of fiddling around I came up with this fix: She checked that all her music on the Music App on her MBA that she backs her phone up to was exactly what she was happy with, and then we deleted the Music App and all her music on her iPhone and then did a back up to the MBA and voila, now she has 60GB free again and only 6GB of mysterious "synced media". I think Apple is road testing their updates with the loyal customers, rather than in their labs... Hope this helps folks:-)

share3141 wrote:

How do we raise this issue to the powers that

be?

Feedback - Watch - Apple

It's a simple display bug. The same count is included twice, someone got it wrong but in terms of how damaging, it is trivial because the same storage space is simply counted twice. It is ugly and annoying, embarrassing for whoever made the mistake but it doesn't impact device usability (except to waste some user time complaining about it).

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 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?