"Other" on My iPhone

I have the same problem. Just tonight a bunch of space marked "other" showed up and it grew the next time I re-synced the phone. I read in an old thread somewhere else that this is what happens if you unplug the phone before sync is done, but I don't think I did that.

I'm as puzzled as you. If you find out anything, let me know, please.

Thanks!

My other has varied from 200 mb to 3 gb. iTunes changes it every sync, so yours should change also.
Try a sync after a power off - power on cycle, maybe the phone needs to clean up some temporary files.

A large other file indicates a corrupt file(s).


A restore should resolve.

I was able to restore from a backup and the "other" file shrank back to a mere 0.30 mb. So it looks like that is a fix. At least it was for me.

So my "other" has grown to 4.2 GB on my 3GS - I did a restore 4 days ago to clear the other, but it came back quickly.

I can't restore every time - it takes almost all night to resynch everything.

Something with the 4.1 software? I haven't experienced this before.

I am going to go ahead and bite the bullet and do another restore to monitor how the "other" grows.

OK - so after doing a restore 2 days ago...

When it was done and I checked my phone in the morning, there was 0.94 GB of other.

After I synch'd again before work, it grew to 1.08GB.

When I got home from work, and added 2 movies and synched, it went to 1.28GB of other.

The next morning, the sync before work showed 1.55GB of other.

Now, after work, the other after synch is 1.55GB.

Mine came back again, after about a week of use. Not sure what's causing it, but getting tired of resetting my phone. Now I'm getting the "Your iPhone cannot be synched (error 13019)" which tells me nothing.

An app you're using is corrupted and causing the problem. Are you restoring to 'New' or from backup??? When you encounter stuff like this it's always best to restore as 'New'. Never completely rely on the iPhone backup alone. Backup everything separately on the computer. Most apps that are worth anything have somewhere in the cloud to backup their information. I don't have an app on my phone that has any information worth anything that can't be backed up somewhere other than the iphone backup...

I have the same problem for a month now...a full restore resolved the problem for a day or so..
In these fora they have tried a more dramatic solution and deleted all files in media subdirectories
http://www.tipb.com/2008/08/01/iphone-restored-how-45gb-of-other-files-ate-my-st orage/comment-page-1/#comments
http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/97281
but im not sure my courage is up for that!?
Has anyone tried or have experience with this??

This is a great utility and it helped me to find the "bad" files.

So first, I stopped synching my music, tv shows, movies, and podcasts - and then synched my iPhone. I verified all movies, music, etc were off by going to the iPod app on the phone.

Then launched DiskAid. Went to Media->iTunes_Control->Music
I copied the "Music" dir to my local harddrive.

Once copied over, you can see what files were being bad. To make it easy, sort by size - because there are 50 folders in there.

Then, I went back to DiskAid and deleted all of the folders in the Music dir, F00-F49.

Back to iTunes and put my media back on. The "Other" is back to around .30 gb.

from what I've seen here and other forums it seems what is classified by iTunes as 'Other' can vary depending on how you use your phone. For instance I don't have a whole bunch of music or sync my phone with Outlook so those solutions didn't really work for me, but I think I have isolated a possible cause. Since I first started having this problem I've restored my phone to factory settings 3 times. The last time I did it and started syncing it in iTunes I noticed an immediate increase in the 'Other' space. This truly infuriated me because this was minutes after I had just restored it to where the 'other' was only 0.25GB, what could possibly be making it increase so rapidly already??? Then it hit me, iOS multitasking! Could that 'Other' be the info from whatever running applications were open in the background when the phone synced? I've experimented for a couple of days now syncing my 3rd generation iTouch and iPhone 3GS several times, always making sure I closed out all apps before syncing, and have not seen any increase in the 'Other' size. Might not apply to all situations, but I'm so geeked that this worked for me thought I would post it.