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

*not purchasing

I've been having the same issues with this other storage I couldn't take it it kept growing larger and larger so today I just went to my local Walmart store and did an exchange for a 32gb iPad air and now I'm looking and my other file is only at so small compared to the 1.88gb and growing on 16gb iPad air maybe something was happening with that iPad I don't know ?

But now this is really strange that my other space is so much smaller only 120mb and I don't have anything but if any of you read my other post I also had a 16gb iPad air and that didn't have anything on it and once I plugged it in to iTunes the other storage shot up to 1.50gb with nothing on the iPad it was clean and with my 32gb iPad I have little to no other storage on it this is really strange

And yes iam a heavy iMessage user sending pictures but I always delete conversations cause I do t like keeping to many

I do same thing with my iphone 5s and the other file on my 5s isn't nearly as high as my ipad

As others have suggested you would think that restoring from a backup would just bring back the same rubbish that was there before, but I have found that this is not the case. Yesterday I suddenly noticed that I had over 14Gb of space occupied by 'other', but a full restore from a backup has brought this down to 1Gb.

So, the immediate problem is resolved but I agree that we still need to understand what is causing the problem to occur in the first place. It is very unnerving to think that this is potentially going to happen again at any stage in the future, with another frustrating and time consuming restore required to fix it again.

To be honest I have some doubts as to whether this space is actually occupied at all or whether the occupied space is being falsely reported, but either way it will still cripple your ability to fully utilise the space available on your device.

I just had to do a "as new restore" on my ipad 4. the "other" was eating up...(i hope you are sitting down)

26GB of space.

Yeah i have a 32gb ipad and 26GB was used up by god knows what.

I did a restore and before i could sync, or download a single app it showed 1gb of "other." literally 10 seconds after i set up the ipad. I should also like to add this is the second time i have had to do this in as many months because of the same problem.

This needs to be fixed apple. really this is sad, i almost miss my ANDROID products now...almost.

Mine is also showing 1Gb of 'other' after the restore, but I would consider this to be reasonably normal considering what would be consumed by emails, calendar entries, iMessages, data kept by third party apps, etc.

If it baloons out to 2Gb I'll be starting to get worried, and 26Gb is just madness!

I believe i may have figured out what caused the 26gb fillup. Seems when you use apples video app to watch movies, tv shows etc from itunes it actually downloads the entire video instead of streaming it.

When i called apple about this i was told, by an apple rep, "itunes is not designed to stream movies or tvshows."

I almost fell off my chair...

So when i rent a movie it just obscurely downloads a full copy of it to my device? yeah i did not think so.

moral of the story. go to general> usage> then tap "show all apps" under videos see what it is using, delete anything in there. you shal soon recover massive amounts of space.

I wonder why it downloads it instead of just buffering and streaming it like it is supposed to. It would use the same bandwidth to DL it as stream it.

It's good that you were able to figure that out, because it illustrates an important point about how "Other" gets filled: basically, any app that has temporary data of any kind stores it in Other. That includes not only downloaded video and music, but downloaded issues of periodicals and newspapers; text, photos and video in the Message app; and many other things that aren't as obvious (such as aborted sync operations). The various partial solutions that people have found for clearing out Other are exactly that: partial. No single strategy will clear out everything for all users (not even restore from backup, for certain apps).

While I don't know much about the internal architecture of iOS (and I haven't done any app development since iOS 5), it's possible to make some guesses based on the programming interfaces provided to app developers and the behavior of apps. My suspicion is that the instantaneous recovery by iOS of unused space is essentially impossible, and even a garbage collection scheme of some sort may be difficult to implement without causing other problems.

iOS isn't unique in this sort of problem. But it's probably unique in the variety of different behaviors of the apps that use its resources. It may be hard for system developers to make assumptions that would facilitate the design of useful garbage collection. The solution that Apple has proposed, as I've said many times, only partly in jest, is this: buy a bigger iPad. With prevailing patterns of use, a 128GB iPad is going to "solve" (more correctly, postpone) the Other problem for the vast majority of users.

All that being the case, if you find a solution for your particular style of use, then you can of course continue to use it effectively. But it's at best a major inconvenience. As I've also said in the past, if it's a deal-breaker for you, you can switch to a device that runs a different OS that doesn't have the Other problem. Rest assured it will have different problems that you may be able to live better with. Or not.

it's not so much this one situaton that disturbs me. Its things like even after a Restore as new, as soon as i pluged the ipad into itunes and before i downloaded a single app or synced my contacts i had 986mb of
"other." simply locking the ipad and leaving it untouched this number jumped to 1.5gb not sending an email, text ...nothing. I gained over half a gig of "other.". I was at nearly 3gb after watching a movie, but at least that i know how/ where to delete the erronious data. In many other circumstances the data cannot be deleted as easily, if at all.

I do agree, simply "buy a bigger ipad will only buy me more time before having to do a "garbage collection" and/ or restore the ipad. In my humble opinion Apple needs to get something solved on this, and fast. How would you like to have to restore your ipad "as new ipad" monthly? i doubt anyone here wants to have to do that, but that is the solution Apple offered me over the phone today. Thats not far from saying "oh your tires are bald? time to buy a new car."

this is a problem that is not going away near as i can tell. Especially when apple tech support tells me that itunes is not designed to stream movies and tv.(aka some guy answering phones in his living room! yes i know how the tech support agents work from home...)

It sounds to me like there are three quite distinct components here:

1.) Legitimate 'other' usage made up of various things that apps need to store in order to function. It's a matter of experience and opinion as to whether this should occupy 1Gb but as I've mentioned above I don't personally consider it unreasonable.

2.) 'Other' usage unnecessarily hogged by apps. Based on others' earlier comments it appears that this can happen in various circumstances such as failed deletions, buggy apps, or the strange video streaming behaviour described above. This scenario is apparent when viewing the space consumed by various apps in the 'usage' section, under 'general', in the settings app.

3.) 'Other' usage that doesn't appear in the usage stats in the settings app. It seems impossible to trace this back to anything and I have my suspicions that the space may not actually be occupied, but rather the usage is just being falsely reported. In my case a restore from backup fixed this.

Apple really needs to improve the syncing between iTunes and iPads and other devices! Minimizing this mysterious "Other" usage of memory space is really frustrating, as is the inability to organize photos and videos according to user needs.

Just to add to this discussion, I recently noticed my 'other' leap from 4 GB to 26 GB, literally in the few minutes it was connected to iTunes.

This is not the first time this has happened and I am fairly sure the problems started when I was using a cheap Lightning connector bought from a company called JazzTek.

I solved the problem by restarting the iPad and syncing with an Apple Lightning connector.

New mini ipad, 3 weeks old, no movies. OTHER is 4.32G... UGH, nothing i do makes it go away.... APPLE!!!!! HELLOOOOO?

I would like to share my solution to the problem here. I had the same problem with my iphone 5s. On a sync with itunes "other" would fill up in minutes. The size went from 2.48 GB, which I considered a normal size, to 8 gb. Upon a next sync it would grow further to exceed my iphones capacity. After a restart everything returned to normal, the "other" size would return to it's original size. But upon a next sync it would grow rapidly again.

First I checked the storage use of my apps. In IOS 6 and 7 you can see the size of the app and the space it needs for other data. Look under "Settings > General > Usage". There you can see where the storage hogs are. Tap the largest apps an look for any apps dat store a lot of data. Count the data usage of the apps, not the size of the apps themselves. Most apps store some kind of data on your phone wether it is documents or game statistics. I checked it, but I soon found out that there wasn't any app that was responsible for the huge storage use.

Then I connected the iphone with my imac. I noticed a rather long sync process. And there were 2 things that drew my attention. Every time I synced, one particular app was copied from the phone to itunes. In my case this was the app Vjay. The last step in the synchronisation process is syncing album covers. This took forever, sometimes up to 15 minutes. And every time I synced, even if nothing had changed on my phone or in iTunes, I ran into the same problems. I then decided to remove Vjay from my phone and this solved all of the problems.

So if you have a high "other" storage use, check your apps, but also check the sync process. I believe this can solve most of the problems.

I know this is a pretty old post, but I'd like to share what ALWAYS works for me when I have this problem (on both my iPhone and iPad)

-First I clear Safari's cache, delete old iMessages and text messages that i don't need. (the usual stuff)

-Connect my iDevice to iTunes

-I delete the apps that have taken up a lot of space by downloading content etc. It's usually the image and video heavy apps like Facebook, Netflix etc. I check which apps take up the most space under "usage" in the "General" section of the iDevice's settings. After I delete them I re-install them using iTunes (other tab still reads that it's taking up a lot of space but that gets taken care of in later steps.)

-I make a full backup of my iDevice (including purchase transfers if they need to be done)

-I then disable "find my ipad/iphone" (I'm using iOS 7) and proceed to settings-->general-->reset-->erase all content and settings.

After the iDevice does its thing I restore it using the just made backup, all your settings, apps and stuff will be there and "other" will no longer take up a crapload of space. The only thing that really ***** is that it takes a while for the whole process to finish, moreso if you have a lot of apps on your iDevice, but it's worth it IMO, I usually do it when I know I won't be using my iDevice for a while.