Help, iPad's "other" space taking so much space!!!!!

Curious pnj7...what's the difference between using multiple exclamation points and repeatedly posting how much it annoys you?

We get it, you don't like a lot of punctuation. Let it go man...let it go... oops, multiple periods, now I've done it!!!

Now on to more important things...No luck on any of the fixes suggested here with the exception of restoring which is not much of a solution. Appreciate everyone's attempts at trying to find a fix though!

In answer to your curiosity, your point is valid, sort of. If selfish people insist on using !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, which is liike crying help in a swimming pool "just for fun," and which means that if anything really were an emergency, nobody would pay attention...then why it is in improper for a lone voice crying in the wilderness to rail against it, even if repetitively. The !!!!!! have not been removed from the subject, have they? It's just a cheap and easy way of trying to call attention to one's self, like jumping ahead in the line.

As for addressing the difficulty which is the topic here, there seems so far to be no fully working solution, but it is good of the people to keep trying to find one.

Re my inferior brain, your superior one instructed you to ask the question without even making an attempt first to see if the problem you posed was valid?

As soon as I plugged it in, it turned itself on, and none of the 'other' disappeared, but thankfully, it didn't increase either!

...well, yes. That already was stated in prev post, as below

"Other" space no change at all????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rather than jack this thread and start arguments with everyone involved, how about just letting a few extra punctuation marks go and restrict your posts to something helpful. How someone using "!!!!!!!!" makes them selfish or why you feel it so necessary that the offending "!!!!!!!" be removed from a post because it bothers you escapes me.

But, to take my own advice, I have nothing constructive to add to this thread either so I'll quit posting until I do 😁 Sorry to waste everyone's time!

I've been restoring my iPad 3 with iOS 6.0.1 every week because of this.

Did anyone already looked to the file system to try to understand if it's any third party app creating a lot of temp files? I've found a lot of temporary files on Skype folder for instance.

I'm trying to find something but until now I only found viber having a backup of my contacts pictures. That can be a problem if you have thousands of contacts.

I'm a developer and I started being suspicious about my own apps but I checked it already.

There are apparently a lot of things that get counted under "Other". In fact, many of the Apple apps have data that counts in Other. I noticed, for example, that MMS media content (i.e., photos and videos that you send or receive as "text" messages) seem to end up getting counted there. Lots of photos and videos can add up pretty quickly.

So far, there are at least a dozen different "this fixed it for me" reports, none of which will work for everyone. I think it's reasonable that there are many things that consume storage, but it's a problem when the user can't know how to use it economically, or how to prune it when it gets excessive. If Apple is doing anything about this, there hasn't been any news. Your choice would seem to be to live with the inconvenience or choose a product from a competitor. Or maybe just add a few hundred !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to your posts to **** off the occasional Asperger's patient who crawls around (and don't jump on me for making fun of the disabled - I'm Asperger's, too).

Does iExplorer work on all iPads, or just jailbroken ones?

Admittedly I'm useless when it comes to technology, but I've installed and opened iExplorer and I can't find that folder (archives, I think it was).

Any suggstions...?

Yes it does on all iDevice, irrespective of JB (mine are not JBroken).

It's just difficult to find the "thing" which occupies "other" and if it is not one or few large files, but many smaller files, it becomes hard to do, also because iExplorer doesn't allow to sort file according to size (or I''d better say, I haven't been able to do that).

In any case, I started with 2,99 GB of "other", desync'ed photos, then suddenly "other" became 1,05!

Thanks, pmikle!

Seems like it's fixed.

[I was able to remove other with the following sequence:

1. Remove all apps, music, movies, TV shows, etc. by unselecting the top check box in each area of the "Sync" area.

2. Synced iPad... still 14GB "Other"

3. Did a "Restore" in the Summary tab... "Other" gone, iPad was blank

4. Restored from backup... "Other" just a sliver

5. Added back all music, apps, etc. by reselecting, I didn't have to re-choose the detailed music, photo and movies selections, iTunes remembered... "other" still a sliver]

I figured out what's taking up all the space. Every time I send a MMS with pictures or videos that history gets backed up even if I delete it! I was able to verify this by looking at my backups and it does show the history. There are freeware tools that lets you see the history. The problem is because of this my other is taking up to 6GB of space. Doing a restore doesn't help. I need a permanent way to (really) delete that history

If you haven't done it yet, REBOOT THE DANG THING!

As a guy who works in IT technical support, I should have taken the cliche advice that people hate for me to tell them, "Reboot it and see if that fixes it."

I tried everyting from installing software that helped you browse the folder structure and was about the factory reset my iPad until I realized that all the cached temporary files probably get cleared on a reboot. DOH! I bet your restore worked because it was forced to turn off finally 🙂

joshlikewhat, I regret to tell you that there is some other stuff at play here. It's a combination of whole lot of stuff like a bad/incomplete synch, some badly developed apps, photos, movies, TV shows et al. It's disappointing that a simple reboot to a more detailed browsing folders and deleting unwanted files does not solve the problem (at least it never did for me). What has always worked is to dock my iPad to my Mac, take a backup and do a factory reset. Restore from the backup and the "Others" comes to acceptable limits (0.75-1 GB, never seen a silver line but always a Yellow band). Unfortunately I have to do this every time I see the space occupied has reached above 8 GB which is once in 2-3 months. Good part is I travel a lot and there is mostly nothing to do at airports, so I can do this. Also, I have 3 iOS devices so the data is spread - e.g. my iPhone 4S & 5 do not have too many photos and movies. My iPad has no music. So at the moment I am living with it, though I am getting pretty frustrated with Apple for not giving any reason or resolution, especially since this darn thing is as old as the iOS itself.

You have stated my problem exactly. I have to reset my phone every few months and I am very frustrated at Apple for not fixing this problem. It's too the point that makes having an iPhone not worth it. These posts about the Other category have been going on for several years with thousands of people affected. Do they really want to lose customers for something that has to be easy to fix. Let us have access to the Other files, so we can at least see what is happening. Apple are you listening?

Companies evaluate bug reports on various criteria, and the fix schedule (if they make the "cut" to be fixed at all) depends on a lot of factors, including difficulty (completely unknown to anyone here), perceived cost in user satisfaction (presumably not small, given that pretty much everyone I know with an iOS device hits it sooner or later), risk of losing business (presumably fairly small, given that competitors' devices have nasty stuff, too), etc.

I suspect that we'll eventually see some fixes, but it may actually be hard to fix it "correctly" (i.e., prevent it from occurring). What may be done is some combination of band-aids (garbage collection style solutions, etc.). As long as "all you have to do" is some sort of reset/reinstall/reboot or buy the next bigger device ("I shouda gotten the 64GB model"), it's not going to cost Apple a lot of business. There are so many other reasons to hate iOS devices, I doubt this one is in the top ten.

I pretty much just gave up on the idea of having all of my photos on my iPad. I don't do iCloud, because I'm frequently nowhere in range of the internet (foreign travel, etc.), so it's just a little red mark on my experience. I'm pretty sure it's the same story for the rest of you. Go get an Android or Windows device if you think this is a fatal flaw, and do please come back and tell us how happy you are with that after a few months. Not saying I'd give Apple a pass on this, but it's not going to put them out of business.