What is "Other" data in iTunes for my iPhone? And why is it over a GB?

I have followed the 3 steps and think I might be doing something wrong.

• I backed up my iphone to my computer

• I restored my phone to its original state by selecting the "restore" button on the summary page

• After the restore, I was prompted to select new or back up from last session. I selected back up from last session and am still getting 4.1GB of "other"

Did I do something wrong? Any help is much appreciated.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This solved my problem exactly. I have 6 Gb of Other. Did a backup and restore. Came down immediately to 0.83 Gb. Thanks again for the help!

I followed these instructions for my daughter's ipod touch. It had 3.1GB of "Other" and after this procedure is now down to around .4GB

You DO lose some data, specifically all images that you've sent or received through iMessage. All the text of the conversations are kept, however, any video or pictures embedded in the messages is deleted.

My guess is that these are stored on the phone as "Other" unless you specifically save them off to your Camera Roll. They are obviously not backed up as part of a device backup - I guess they figure it's not important if you haven't chosen to specifically save them - and are not restored when you perform the restore from most recent backup step.

So, if you have important images in your iMessage history, you'll want to save those off prior to restoring your device. Alternately, you could look for and delete images and videos individually and see how that affects your "Other" usage then decide if proceeding with a restore is worthwhile.

When you view your message history, you have to click "load earlier messages" continually until you get to the very first message. Then scroll down to find the first image. Tap it and you'll be able to easily scroll through all images in that conversation's history. If you try to do this by finding only the most recent image, you won't see all the images in older parts of the conversation history.

As for those who have performed Boz's procedure and still have a huge "Other" usage, you may need to look in other spots to see what valid data it might be.

The other data on itunes is corrupted data. For example, if you were syncing your device with itunes, and the sync was suddenly cancelled, itunes would put that unsynced data into the 'other' category. The only way to get rid of it is by a restore. Do not restore from a backup. Just restore as a completely new device. After the restore, itunes will ask you if you want to use a backup, select the backup you want and just let itunes do the rest. This method helped me get rid of my 5.7GB of other data.

It's not corrupt data. The most accurate description would be orphaned data.

What's contained in other is actually viable useful readable info. Corrupt would suggest that it's relevant to nothing and cannot be used in any way.

This isn't a bug by the way. Most GUI based OS platforms and iOS platforms have the need to work in a space of storage (windows calls it "virtual memory" and has pagefile.sys as a placeholder for it's use) which is not static and can be more readilly accessed.

To avoid rapid accumulation of the "other" growth:

1) ALWAYS close an app when you are done. Simply pressing the home key to bail the app focus is not enough.

You must double tap home, hold down any icon and click the X on any apps you want closed.

2) Try to read up on your vendors. If you just buy apps at will free or not, and install them, you will have a huge other. If you read up on the thoroughness of app development vendors you will find out whether or not they are lazy. Bad developers use sloppy code to shorten their work period. This leads to a lot of broken calls and dumps that are continually parsed from random locations in storage. A good software company (like angry birds) will "sandbox" their metadata as aforementioned in here. This typically gets flushed during any connection to a computer with itunes. If you use iCloud, you can offload up to 5GB of this other data as well. It's not a cure all as some items there will NOT export to iCloud storage. The more basement the app you install, the greater its chances of junking up your "other" area.

3)Reboot often. Most people open up tons of apps, never close them and always leave their phone on. A good practice is to hold the lock button until you get the red slide (after you've closed everything first) and slide it over. The phone will power off and then you can press the lock button again to power back on. This will ensure any pre-launch items are cleared out. That's why when you turn off it just doesn't simply blank out. You get a progress pinwheel and THEN it shuts off. Part of this is the power off unbind that happens to running background procedures. If any of them are claiming an area of "other", it won't let go until you shutdown. Again this is only for a percentage of items.

Doing all 3 of these practices will keep it from growing significantly.

Hope this helps.

(in other words, attack this at both sides. Clean it out manuall as this thread suggests, but also adjust your use of the phone in a way that slows the growth a lot.)

Forgot to mention:

4) Manually clear out sandbox info if the app allows it:

Settings gear icon>General>Useage (iOS 5.1.x and later required.)

Under STORAGE you will see a list of items that are using your OTHER area.

You can view what apps are using how much and on what info.

"high scores 678KB" or "Documents and Data 1.3mb" and so on.

You will have either a DELETE APP button (which does what it says)

or you will have a "CLEAR USER DATA" button or you will have the ability to right swipe the listed component and gain it's amount of used space back as free space.

The ability to clear specific app sandbox data is rare.

Knowing what's being consumed however is a valuable item and can aid in where you want to trim the fat.

Sorry for the necropost btw. Didn't really check the date when I originally posted.

I did as was suggested in here and I only went from 1.45gb to 951mb which isn't much.

I did look in usage and there's quite a bit of legitimate "other" data and I decided to wipe out the apps that were consuming it.

I have a theory on this if it helps.

My 'Other' on my 64 GB ipad has reached over 11GB and so there is no way this can be attributed to app data and email attachments etc, at that size it has to be video. I have a slightly complex setup in that all my movies are stored on a NAS and then itunes is aware of there location.

Occasionally I have re-booted my computer and the NAS has not ben present at the time.

What seems to happen is if I dock the iPad and try to sync new movies, the space is allocated but itunes can't upload the movie file to the ipad as it cant see the NAS. This grows over time and becomes the 'Other' annoying yellow stripe.

The only way to clear it to my knowledge is to wipe the ipad from the settings/general menu, allow it to re-boot and then when propmpted reload the latest backup. If anyone else knows how to clear this without this process I'd love to hear!

Hope that helps

had the same issue with "Other" 11+G of it! Tried this process and it shrank to 600M. Nice job. Been trying for months to figure out what it was, why it was, and how to get rid of it. Still don't know why - but it's gone. Thx!

email attachments (as well as emails themselves), Notes (particularly if they have images in them), Voice memos, voice mail, game data (game center files): All these things are "Other" and if cleaned up/removed, will save you lots of space.

I've read through this thread, though I'm still not 100% clear... will there be anything important that I will actually lose that doesn't get backed up even if I follow the directions provided?

Also, I wasn't monitoring my phone space over the past weekend, but I purchased a movie through iTunes that ended up being a pretty big file (Godfather in HD), and it took a few tries to get it to download properly. I've read a few things about "orphaned data" or something along those lines... could what was downloaded during the failed download attempts of the movie be accounting for some of the "other" data? The "other" data showing on iTunes accounts for over 6GB, and I went through my apps, and I have a hard time believing that all of the app data is accounting for all of that space since it doesn't add up. I generally delete pics/movies that are sent via text.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Thank you. Very helpful. Been trying to figure this out for years.

This was very helpful as well. Thanks for the explanation. These are good things to keep in mind going forward. Although as you said, when I looked in the Usage page on device, I didn't find any instances to wipe sandbox user data. But, you said it was rare. I'll keep an eye on it for the future. I've been doing most of the other things. So, I'm glad i'm on the right track.

Thanks everyone. I'll add my voice to those who didn't want to lose certain data and settings that would have been wiped out if i just reset to a new device. I wondered about if backing up from "Last Back up" really made a difference. I see that it does.

This is an interesting discussion and helped me to solve a puzzle.

My "Other"section on my iPad had grown to 2GB in the 3 months I have had my iPad. Did both restores suggested above to see what happens. Worked OK but now re-installing my purchased apps. The "Other" section has gone down 712Mb.

I think that Apple should be looking into this problem and give users a clear indication of what to do and explanation as to why this happens. Also, Apple should provide a fix so the "Other" does not grow out of all proportions to storage capacity.

Regards

Schof