Q: How do I get rid of "other" storage

I just installed system 6 in my iPhone 4 today, and in addition to all the bells & whistles that I didn't ask for, I got around 2 Gb of "other" added to my collection, which now occupies almost 50% of my 16Gb memory. (Sigh)

I'll be taking posession of my iPhone 5 this week, and saying good riddance to the problem, at least for now.

I like Bill Mullen's suggestion, and will try it on what is about to be my old "4" just before I hand it down to my wife, who will use it as a phone for the most part. I've been chicken to try any of the suggestions that I've read to resolve the issue for fear of losing important data I will admit that my local Apple store gave me a soulution a couple of years ago that actually reduced the amout of "other" to .5 Gb, whille at the same time erased a lot of unimportant info, such as game scores. I'd try that method again, but sadly the solution is now lost in my archives, for all I know it may have been erased when I flushed the "other" way back then.

Good luck everyone!  If I discover the solution, I'll report back.

Hi bemerv,

I'm interested to know if my solution worked for you.

I upgraded to IOS 6 today... and ended up with over 6GB of "other" leaving me with about .3GB of free space. I did what I did before, I went to photos within itunes and checked one more event (3 pictures of my cat), then sync'd with my iphone and the space occupied by "other" reduced to 1.4GB

Bill, my new iPhone showed up, so I thought I might have the problem behind me,  but after the first backup, the "other" all but doubled on the iPhone 5.    Here we go again.

Hi bemerv,

Sorry to hear the problem is still there, I think my "solution" doesn't fix the problem, but it seems to force the iphone to re-calculate the "other" space which gets the "other" down to a less horrible amount so that you have a more workable situation.

As it's quite simple and doesn't involve restores and deleting stuff I think its ok for now until Apple finally gets its act together and fixes the root cause - whatever that turns out to be.

Good luck - Bill

Bill, your take on forcing the iPhone to re-calculate makes sense. I gave my old phone to my wife, and when it re-synched to her card, the "other reduced to .5 GB. so I never got the chance to put your method to the test.

BTW -  Does the name "Signature Music" ring a bell? If so, I'm an old client. Yorktowne Studio. 

so much other!!

That really worked with my iPhone4, not. I just lost 1Gb by trying that method.

I synced 3 times in succession and each time I lost 400Mb so thought I'd try your method, I lost a further 1Gb.

hought I'd learned my lesson about never to sync again.

Hi all-

What I did was went into iTunes, clicked on my iphone, went to Summary and clicked  Back up to my computer, rather than iCloud.

My 'free' which is more important than 'other' went from .47 gb to 1.15 gb

Short of restoring the iphone, I would try it.

I backed up to my computer and deleted everything from my iphone 4s 16g. I then restored my iphone and I went from 2.72gig to 3.75gig. how does that work? Anyway nothing has worked and I am still trying to troubleshoot. If anyone has a cure please let us know!!

I have gone thru the whole process of deleting my music via settings and have experienced the same issues with songs not playing and/or being skipped over all together, though it did reduce my "other". After recently syncing with my PC I could see that not all of my songs were on my iphone as there was too much "other" again. As music is the most important part my my iphone (for me anyway; that's why I bought the 32GB) I want all of my songs on my iphone and want them to play. I have removed all music from my phone and am currently adding my entire library back onto it. I first check how much space I had to ensure all of my music would fit. With having 4.75GB of "other" all of my music would not fit. I went into my phone and deleted all of my text messages as some had photos and a couple movies. I then went into settings and then into safari and cleared cookies, date and history. I deleted a few apps as well that I never use and only got because I thought they come in handy, i.e. barcode scanner (never used once). Once I did that and synced my phone I was able to get the "other" down to 2.4GB. It's still a bit, but at lease I can now fit my entire music library on my phone, which is what I really wanted anyway.

It seems to me that the only way to keep "other" under control is to regular clear cookies and browsing history, text messages and any other pics/videos you truly don't need on your phone. I keep my phone backed up to my PC as it would be far too much to pay for cloud service each month with all the music I have. I have also been tinkering with my gmail acct to see if that helps any. I went into my email settings and changed my deleted email from going into my "all mail" folder to the trash folder. While on my PC, I go into my gmail acct and clear out that folder all together. I have also started creating folders for receipts and what not to help organize my email. From there, while on my PC, I went into my "all mail" folder and from the drop box at the top, I had it select all "unread" messages and I deleted those and then removed them from the trash folder. As these unread emails were junk to begin with, you don't need to worry about what your removing. I'm going to keep going bak and managing my emails to see of that helps with the "other", but I will never do the "delete music with the finger swipe" again as the irritation of not being able to play my music brought me to this point where I now need to wait hours for all of my music to get back on my phone.

I hope this helps in some way.

I followed jeggoe's advice earlier in this thread on page 1 and used diskAid. discovered that when looking at recordings (from Voice Memo, et al) that my recordings were taking 10GB plus of space.

for some reason the recordings were duplicating each other. in some experimentation i discovered that it was doing so during sync or recovery. one recording had duplicated itself 40 times.

voice memos stored on iTunes can also responsible for the iTunes screensaver not working correctly, so i backed up up the recordings to my hard drive, then deleted them from both iTunes and my iPhone. The only way to delete them from the iPhone was to use DiskAid or another file manager for iPhone/iPod. I was able to use DiskAid in demo mode to do so. Also under the music tab, unchecked Sync voice memos.

First you go settings/general/usage/music/then left swipe over music and press delete and you would think it deletes your music but it dosent insted it deletes your other but make sure your ipod is connected to a computer wile doing this

This worked perfectly for me.  More people need to know about this simple solution in other threads. I have iTunes match so I can't say if it would have affected my music otherwise.

I had 25GB of "other." Used DiskAid to poke around and found in /Storage/Media/Recordings about 24GB of duplicate copies of voice memos. Deleted these files and problem solved!

This works until you sync your phone Apple device again. Once you sync it the "other" goes back up to what it was. Tried this many times but each time the result was the same. Now to sync my 1200 songs again, but, hey, it was worth a try.