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

I just followed the steps in this link and it completely worked. My "Other" was over 8GB and now is 477MB. All related to music of all things! The post is from 2011 and describes an iphone 3G, but the steps were the same for my ipad. I used iExplorer in the free Demo mode.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/8456/how-can-i-clean-up-other-storage-o n-iphone-3g

Finally, a solution that works! Thank you SuzB1992!

This hasn't worked for me, deleting those files has made almost no difference 😟

Tried PhoneClean which helped clear down some App data but other is still 2.5GB for me. Darn.

New iPad, set up as a new device.

Connected it to my MacBook Pro and immediately it shows 1.6GB of "other".

It's a 16GB device and only starts with 12.8GB available so this is quite a large proportion of my available storage (12.5%).

Any ideas?

I've restored from a backup I did of the device once I'd set it up from new and used it for a day.

I've also deleted today's copies of two newspapers.

No music, no movies sync'ed

I solved my issue with a variation on the delete and restore backup process. I had tried a number of other suggestions, and none had worked. I was at 3.9GB of "Other" and now I'm down to 745kB.

Here are my steps:

1. Backup iPad - I did both iCloud and this computer (to be safe)
2. Erase All Content and Settings from Settings, General, Reset option
3. When iPad restarts and you go through the basic startup entries restore Backup from iCloud
4. When that finishes, the iPad informs you that it will now download apps that you had previously installed

I think this works because you're not restoring the junk files that were backed up to the computer, whereas iCloud backup seems to only be key settings and "pointers", not the actual files and storage that are clogging up "Other" storage. Then when it re-downloads your apps from the Store, they are "fresh", and don't contain the bloated storage they use up over time.

Hope this helps some of you.

If you "stream" moves from the "Cloud" like I do i discovered I'm not "streaming" at all. I'm downloading from Apple to my 32GB iPad 2. Every movie I watched on my big screen TV added another movie to my iPad.

I imagine it's the same for any other "Cloud" service. Not sure since movies are all I really use.

I discovered if I go to Settings>General>Usage, and wait for the data to upload, sure enough there was 90% of my "Other" 14GB!

I hit "Edit" and used the ubiquitous "Red" button, and sure enough, I'm back to 1.3GB of other.

I guess that amount can account for App data, etc., that I have seen mentioned previously.

The "Restore" method worked, all right, until I "streamed" another one of my iTunes movies from the Cloud.

What a PAIN! This was not the Apple I respected!

Now I'm back to the (almost) "User Friendly" usage that I so enjoy on my iPad verses all the (cumbersome) competition.

I'm no expert at this stuff, but I hope this is helpful.

If you "stream" moves from the "Cloud" like I do i discovered I'm not "streaming" at all. I'm downloading from Apple to my 32GB iPad 2. Every movie I watched on my big screen TV added another movie to my iPad.

I imagine it's the same for any other "Cloud" service. Not sure since movies are all I really use.

I discovered if I go to Settings>General>Usage, and wait for the data to upload, sure enough there was 90% of my "Other" 14GB!

I hit "Edit" and used the ubiquitous "Red" button, and sure enough, I'm back to 1.3GB of other.

I guess that amount can account for App data, etc., that I have seen mentioned previously.

The "Restore" method worked, all right, until I "streamed" another one of my iTunes movies from the Cloud.

What a PAIN! This was not the Apple I respected!

Now I'm back to the (almost) "User Friendly" usage that I so enjoy on my iPad verses all the (cumbersome) competition.

I'm no expert at this stuff, but I hope this is helpful.

Great solution SuzB1992, this method worked for me. My problem started when I reinstalled Windows so obviously new iTunes which became a problem when I needed to sync, it asked if I wanted to sync with the new PC which I said yes, but then it seemed to want to put all my photos/music on twice making it over capacity.

Once I deleted the appropriate folders in the Media directory using DiskAid, rebooted the iPad and synced, all was good (but obviously everything had to be re-copied).

I tried basically all the suggestions here (restore, deleting app data etc), and still had around 4.2gb 'other'. Turns out the following files were the cause, which can only be browsed with some 3rd party viewer (I used i-funbox). The first one was some rogue file just sitting there in the VLC 'inbox', which probably happened when I clicked a movie file and asked it to open in VLC. However this data usage did not show up under VLC.

User/Library/Application Support/Containers/[random text including VLC]/Documents/Inbox/movie.m4v

The other was the pending ios update, that I didn't want to install (and had deleted on a prior occasion). These files totalled around 2.5GB.

User/Library/Assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_softwareUpdate

User/Library/Assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_softwareUpdateDocumentation

After deleting those files my 'other' went to around 650MB.

Different users will have different files (and I guess most would have installed the update, so the update data should be cleared). I would suggest using i-funbox to search for all large files (> 50000kb), which is what I did to locate the above - there are not too many files matching this search criteria, and the ones taking up the space are likely to be large files.

Same problem here, with iOS 6.1 on the iPad - OTHER taking up 5.54 GB of space and could not get rid of it. After fiddling around and thinking about it, and having nothing work, I realized the problem is probably that the iPad is caching information - possibly video, possibly newspapers or magazines I subscribe to, etc. since I have no documents, under 500 mb in photos and not that much music. Unless the app has a way to dump the cache of stuff, it just stays on the iPad forever, filling up the OTHER category. Safari lets you delete cookies and cache. Chrome does not let you do that so I deleted Chrome and reinstalled, thinking there were tons of temporary files, but it made no difference reinstalling it.

The only way I found to solve it is to back up the iPad (I backed up to iCloud and then this computer, using iTunes. And then go into Settings and erase everything on the iPad. Now go to iTunes and tell it to Restore the iPad. If you do not want to update your software (I did not want to) then do not follow any instruction to update software first, say no if it asks, and do not click the Update Software button in iTunes. Mine restored to 6.1, same as it had before.

A reason not to update to iOS 7.0 or 7.1 is that you can no longer designate how many emails you want displayed. I only want 50 displayed for each email account, not thousands. To my knowlege this feature removal has not been fixed.

After the restore, my OTHER category dropped to 2.49 GB. Still too much in my opinion but far better than a growing 5.5 GB. I actually had to delete a bunch of apps because I was running out of space on the iPad. It is the iPad 3 with wifi and 16 GB of space (actually more like 13+, I think.

This problem is REALLY totally unacceptable.

I got a iPad Air 32GB and 12.6 GB is taken by OTHER. And I can´t see where this space is used.

And this problem is old. It was already described more than two years ago.

OK, so you vented. I hope you feel better, because, while I agree with you, we can see that Apple has done very little about it (and that's largely because it's a hard problem).

There are "solutions" if you find your situation intolerable:

1. Buy a bigger iOS device (I bought a 128GB iPad and haven't been bothered by it since, although it's still there).

2. Switch to a different platform (you have Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry 10 and maybe others to choose from). These also have "unacceptable" problems, just different ones.

3. Keep resetting, resync'ing, rebooting, restoring, etc. to keep the Other usage down.

I hope that you've provided feedback to Apple on this, because they don't have to pay attention to these forums (you can be sure they're well aware of the problem - don't you think Apple employees use these devices, too?).

So I've been looking into this problem for weeks. I almost resorted to writing and compiling an App from xCode that would delete these cached files (since I'm a iOS developer), however I discovered a solution.

If you stream a movie it puts it in media/CloudAssets which shows up as "other" when you are plugged into iTunes. When you start a movie it creates a file in this folder where it stores the information downloaded as you stream. It stores one of these files for every video you stream. They do this so when you have "start playing" set to "where left off" under your video app settings the movie can start immediately where it left off instead of waiting for a connection, starting a download, and then start playing.

So my work around is to set settings > Videos > "Start Playing" to "From Beginning". This all by itself won't fix the problem. What this will do is every time you start playing a video it will wipe out the contents of the file relating to that specific video and start downloading it over again. So if you start the video over again and quickly close out the file will remain but it's contents will be deleted and replaced with the contents of the new download. If you don't give it a chance to download it will effectively be just a few KBs or MBs instead of GBs.

This does mean you need to remember the videos you watched. If you rented you need to do this before it's removed from your device (sometimes it will leave it's contents if you streamed it).

I closed out of the video app completely (by swiping up for the app switcher) a few times to make sure the changes took, but I don't believe this is necessary.

I hope this helps someone.

My iPad Air running iOS 8.0.2 was showing 3.3 GB of used space under the "Other" category. I don't sync any music onto it, and none of my installed apps were using anything that even came close to totaling 3.3 GB. I used iFunBox to search all over the iPad's storage for anything that was wasting space and couldn't find anything, aside from a couple hundred megabytes worth of videos the VLC app was storing unnecessarily--slightly wasteful, but not 3.3 GB.

What finally worked for me was to back up the iPad with iTunes, then on the iPad do Settings->General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings. Finally, when it came back up in iTunes as a new iPad, I restored from the backup I had just created. Now it is set up exactly the way it was before with all of my settings, mail, documents, and pictures intact, but the "Other" usage totals 1.3 GB. So that was 2 GB of space (about 17% of the total 11.7 GB of storage) wasted for what appears to be no reason at all. It was annoying to have to restore the iPad, but totally worth it to regain the lost space.

It would sure be nice if iTunes would give us a little more detail about what's using up the space in the Other category.

Using Doug's method got my "other" from 6.8gb to 1.3 ..Thanks for the tip Doug...