iPhone 4 'Other' Space is 6.8GB!?!?!

I tried the music method- no luck. Do you all suggest the back up and re-sync method? My "other" data is currently 3.1 GBm and when I synced it about a month back it was much smaller- and this is 3.1 AFTER I deleted the text message thread where my friend had been sending me countless gifs....

I had the same issue and I have just followed the steps suggested by aaronjk55 and it has given me 4GB from 800MB!!! Thanks!

It seems iTunes Match does have something to do with this. On my iPhone, Other went from 7.3gb to a few hundred mb's after I disabled iTunes Match, deleted Music in Settings->Usage, and synced. I also have an iPad 2 with iTunes Match enabled, and iTunes reports 6 songs totaling 1.5mb (confirmed those are voice memos) but I have an Other amounting to 2.92gb. If I disable iTunes Match, "Other" drops to 1.8gb.

Thanks to aaron my Other file went from an absurd 11.1gb down to 2.6gb, taking my available space from 168mb up to 9.3gb!

This appears to be the fix I was looking for but I wish I understood why it worked. I don't even store local media files on my phone. Were these Other files possibly music downloads from iCloud?

I've noticed that songs that have been played on the phone thru iCloud can play right away, as if they were local files, while songs from my 3tb iTunes archive that show as available on my phone but have not been played on the phone from the cloud before seem to be downloading, buffering, caching, or the like, before they play. Since I usually just leave iTunes running on my phone at all times (with the volume muted, I keep iTunes on a constant shuffle of my archive on both phone & PC), s this how I got to 11.1gb of unviewable Other data?

FWIW, I had two years of messages stored going way back to my move from Blackberry to 3GS--which totaled a negligible ~3mb. Data hogging apps were dealt with long before I arrived here. The 11.1gb dead space was a total mystery to me as I could not see what type of files they were.

Can anyone confirm that iCloud is the culprit here?

Thanks aaronjk55. Worked great and I went from 3.3GB to 202MB

So I've tried this several times and my other data has gone UP (from 3.1 to 3.57 GB). I checked and my iTunes matching is disabled and I've deleted and re-synced my music. How is everyone doing this? Do I need to restore my phone to new?

didn't work for me (9GB other)...

And it ****** me off; something using 'my' space without me being able to see what it is and doing something about it!

Anybody know of an app for that?

root files in iOS: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=view+root+files+on+iphone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=267aPTu5kqA

^4real tho, its ez

NO! Restore as new is the last thing you want to do!

Is your phone synched with any cloud services outside of iCloud? Could be a Bitly, Twitpic, Pocket, Wordpress, maybe podcast players, a service that pushes to Picassa/Flickr/Tumblr, a radio show app that's downloading its archive--it's gonna be something like that. Look at your apps under Settings>Usage & start deleting apps. Can always load them back on the phone; you bought them so they're yours to keep. Good luck

1st tnx for your reply; nice to know there's someone out there! 🙂

I've just disabled gmail and my works caldav, but still the same 8,63 GB

Any other options?

See my comment @dias? I'm thinking its the same type deal. Could be that an aggregator app is pulling everything to your phone b/c the desktop version is uninstalled; or maybe when you signed up for Drive you told it to pull your whole Dropbox (or one is duplicating into the other).

A/V apps! Streaming apps could be set to dl for offline consumption--YouTube, CNN, Bloomberg, et al will fill ya quick if you have an app installed for grabbing YouTube clips. Photo apps, too, especially if they're pushin to & pullin from Facebook. If they also are allowed to talk to each other and your content posts to fb from within almost any app, that's potentially a lot of redundancies in your root system.

Are you subscribing to podcasts that are dl'ing automatically?

Do you buy digital files from the Amazon music cloud server?

When you go to Settings & check Auto Re-connect settings for every app. Some could be dl'ing all new content since last time opened or even by posting.

Prioritize & start deleting apps; the metadata doesn't appear in the Apps partition when you plug into iTunes but I'd bet there's a whole bunch of app-related data.

Aaron, you're a genius!! I just went from 6.7GB of "other" with less than 1GB free to other that doesn't even appear and 5.77GB free. Thank you!!! 😍

Hey @jgauthiersloan. I unfortunately already did a phone restore- my other had jumped up from 3.47 to 4.47 in a night. I did the restore then restored from a back up- no data lost and my other went to 0.47 GB.

I THINK the culprit is my friend who insists on sending me roughly 100 gifs a day. I delete them all, but my memory is slowly shrinking again. Are they being saved somewhere else that I can disable? I have iMessage sent to only go to my phone, not my apple email account. Are they being saved elsewhere as well?

Sorry @Dias, you won't hear me claim to know anything for sure, but it seems that someone is surreptitiously storing metadata (maybe as part of their basic terms agreement?). Are these gifs being forwarded to or from Facebook? Are you using gifboom or similar photo sharing apps? What about google analytical or similar web tracking service (maybe for your twitter or maybe your friend tracking clicks/views on those gifs thru one of these services?

If you've done the restore & the problem just started over then I'm thinking an app you rely on has permission to do this. Try checking your account settings & API permissions thru the websites for these services on a computer (preferably on a browser you don't normally use so you're coming in "fresh"). Good luck & plz let us know the fix!

Hey @jg...nah he just sends them through iMessage and just copies and pastes them directly.

I'm tempted to say its mostly him. I clear out the gifs and my Safari use, but it always goes down when he initially send a gif or after one of his stream of gifs. I told him to stop so I could get an idea of if that was it and that seemed to at least slow it down or stop it all together. Maybe all that data is being stored somewhere?

I was having the same problem with space on my iPad & iPhone. I even reset the ipad back to factor setting then, for my sins, was forced to upgrade to 6.1.3...Grrrr!

Anyway back to the point. I decided to check the folder sizes of all folders in the iPhone's system(JB required) and found a whopping great video file(7Gb), taken with the iPhone, tucked away within a folder in the DCIM folder.

For some reason, known only to themselves, Apple have left the Photo app out of the usage list(please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this!), and the Photo App entry in the About list only show the number of items, not the storage space used.

So if you're running low on storage space have a look at your Camera Roll to see if you have any space-hogging videos in there.