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

Why isn't this working for me?? It deletes my music every time and does nothing for the "other" space... Now renamed "documents and data". Anyone? :( I can't even upgrade my iOS because I don't have enough space. I have no pics and no music and still NO SPACE!!!!!!

And my phone is now taking up so much space from messages?? What the heck

1. Backup to iTunes

2. Reset phone to factory default (clear all)

3. Restore from iTunes

4. Use iTunes to update iOS

TigerA wrote:

My understanding is that not all music will be ok after that procedure.

That's an understatement. It totally corrupts your music index and album art, and your music will no longer play correctly and may not play at all. It's a very bad idea. The only way to recover from the corrupted data is to restore your phone as New, then reload all of your content. This "solution" has been around for several years. It doesn't work, makes additional problems, but it seems to never go away. The mods delete references to it when they can, but they still miss a lot.

After a lot of research and a few of the unsuccessful "easy" attempts to fix the 10.74GB of "other" on my iPhone 4S (16GB), I was resigned to doing the "restore" option. During the process, I was prompted (ie: forced?) to update from iOS 6 to iOS 7. After I restored to the backup I made about 10 minutes ago, I found that I went from 200MB free to about 1.1GB... better, but not what I was looking for.

HOWEVER, upon viewing iTunes, my "other" section had dissappeared... and was replaced with a "Documents & Data" section (perhaps I had the "documents & data" section before the iOS upgrade... but I never paid attention to it because it wasn't large enough to draw any attention). This got me thinking...

So, I went and checked the usage in my settigns on the iPhone and discovered that "Messages" is now listed there (thanks to iOS7)... and it is consuming 14.7GB! I had no idea it was that big... but as many others have speculated, this appears to have been the majority of my "other" data.

Now that I know, I can go through my messages and delete them until I get down to an acceptable level of storage.

If you find the Message still occupy a lot of memory after deleting all your Messages, you may need to use iBachupBot to delete the entire subdirectories under System Files > Mediadomain > Library > SMS > Attachments in the backup file, followed by a restore.

I found this elsewhere (from aaronjk55, but it worked for me.

On your iPhone, go to Settings>General>Usage. Swipe the Music line to the left and press delete. IMMEDIATELY shut the phone off-don't exit or anything like that. When you turn on your phone and connect it to iTunes, you may find a huge chunk of your "other" space gone.

This worked for me on iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and 4 (iOS6 & 7). Other data has gone from a few GBs to 600MB.

OMG, this TERRIBLE advice just won't go away. Yes, it will reduce your OTHER, but it does it by deleting REAL DATA that you need - your music catalog index and album art. Wait until you try playing your music. It will mostly not play, but if it does it will skip, play the wrong track, or crash the music app.

I had a whopping 8 gb of other. I uninstalled Facebook and Instagram and that took "other" to less than 2 gb. I then reinstalled both apps with no added "other" to show for it.

Well personally I think I am going to have to live with 500 mb of other space on my 8mb IPhone 4S.

Just did a factory restore. IT shows 500 mb in other. Only thing on the phone now is contacts updated through I cloud nothing else added in, have not sync music or reloaded any apps. I guess that means my contacts info is corrupted.

When I check usage on my phone it shows I am using 526 mb with contacts the highest using 18 mb then calandar is using 2mb and the rest under 1 mb so obviously there is a glitch somewhere in the system. May try to redo all my contacts, sigh that might take some time but I really would like the 526 to go AWAY

500 MB is the absolute minimum for Other on an iPhone. It includes all of the iOS settings data, all of the built in apps that you cannot remove, etc. There is no glitch; iOS has a lot of data to maintain. As with everything in computers, it has grown slowly with each version. iOS 5 the minimum Other was about 300 MB.

Would not recommend doing the deleting music technique that aron uses as I did it excactly as instructed and deleted all my music :S

After reading many posts I have followed the below steps on my iPhone 4s (iOS 7.1.1) and it cleared my "others" space significantly, increasing my free space from 1GB to 3GB.

1. Take a backup of your iPhone on iCloud.

2. Update iTunes to the latest version.

3. Sync your iPhone with iTunes.

4. On the iPhone goto Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings.

5. Choose setup as "New" when prompted.

6. This will render your iPhone as new, so you have to setup your iPhone as you would have done when you bought it.

7. Restore your backup from iCloud.

8. Sync your iPhone with iTunes.

This should do the trick.

This worked for me!!!!

Posted by:

aaronjk55 Jul 26, 2012 12:23 PM in response to philipjamesbowen

I found this elewhere, but it worked for me.

On your iPhone, go to Settings>General>Usage. Swipe the Music line to the left and press delete. IMMEDIATELY shut the phone off-don't exit or anything like that. When you turn on your phone and connect it to iTunes, you may find a huge chunk of your "other" space gone.

When I first did it, it scared the living daylights out of me, but it worked. My other space was quite a bit smaller, but I now have 0.1 GB of other space.

its not that scary i tried it and it worked but not that much and if you lose all your songs you can always sync it again