I cannot clear "Other" memory use. Any help?

The Apple Support Communities are an international user to user technical support forum. As a man from Mexico, Spanish is my native tongue. I do not speak English very well, however, I do write in English with the aid of the Mac OS X spelling and grammar checks. I also live in a culture perhaps very very different from your own. When offering advice in the ASC, my comments are not meant to be anything more than helpful and certainly not to be taken as insults.

One way to force Other to be recalculated is to connect the iPad to your computer with the USB cable. Open iTunes to the Summary pane. Reset the iPad by pressing and holding the Home and Power buttons at the same time until the Apple logo appears. You will need to quit and reopen iTunes to see the recalculated Other.

How Do I Get Rid Of The “Other” Data Stored On My iPad Or iPhone?

http://tinyurl.com/85w6xwn

With an iOS device, the “Other” space in iTunes is used to store things like documents, settings, caches, and a few other important items. If you sync lots of documents to apps like GoodReader, DropCopy, or anything else that reads external files, your storage use can skyrocket. With iOS 5, you can see exactly which applications are taking up the most space. Just head to Settings > General > Usage, and tap the button labeled Show All Apps. The storage section will show you the app and how much storage space it is taking up. Tap on the app name to get a description of the additional storage space being used by the app’s documents and data. You can remove the storage-hogging application and all of its data directly from this screen, or manually remove the data by opening the app. Some applications, especially those designed by Apple, will allow you to remove stored data by swiping from left to right on the item to reveal a Delete button.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Hello, I took the time to sum all the data that was taken by the apps and the files related to the apps (like maps in a GPS app or documents in Quick Office). The total is equal to the field "Apps" in the scale of usage. So what you are saying is not related nor reflected in the "other" field. At the same time, withouth changing anything, only synchronizing a couple of songs, my "other" jumped from 400 MB to 2,8 GB.
Regards,

Hello Mike. Try the following. Make sure that your phone is not linked to iTunes via USB or wifi. That means eject it from iTunes.
Then in your phone go to Settings/General/Usage. Click on "music". This will take you to another windows where you will only see "music". Sweep from left to right to erase the music and click on delete. After you do that it will take you to the previous page. There, hold the sleep button until the power off switch appears and turn the iphone off. Turn it back on and connect it to iTunes via USB (I guess wifi should work too). Sync it again and see what happens.
That works for me. I've eliminated like 5 times most of the "other" space.
It appears again whenever a sync is interrupted. So make sure to eject the iPhone, iPad, etc from iTunes, before you disconnect it. Recently I didn't and my "other" jumped from 400 MB to 2.7 GB because of that.

I guess doing the same with other apps might free even more space from "other" but I haven't checked yet.

Regards,

Lucky

I just followed LuckyAg999's advice and I gained back all of my "other" easy peasy! Thanks, Lucky!

Susanfromaurora, I am glad to hear it worked. Anyways I would like to warn you that after doing it, I started having some problems with the music. Some songs would not be recognized, would be skiped or one song would play, but the name and cover would correspond to another song. If this happens to you, make a back up and restore your iDevice.
Regards,

Lucky

Yep, it's happening. I listen on shuffle a lot and it's doing just what you described. I've never had to do a restore on my phone. Is it relatively painless?

Depending on how much capacity, how many apps, and how full it is, it can take up to a couple of hours. I would do it over night.
Besides that, it's easy and at the end you have the same as before. Unfortunately, the yellow bar from "other" comes back too.

Any idea what's happening? I see lots of people posting about the skipping problem not related to the "other" free space problem. And no one is answering any of them.

You are a genius! This worked for me! Its been bugging me for months! Thanks so much for sharing

Brilliant. Just used it on my iPad 4 running OS7 and it worked like a charm. Thank you! 🙂

Hi all,

Re: "Other" showing an unreasonably high storage figure.

I had this problem for a couple of weeks and I tried most of the suggestions in these forums. NOTHING worked.
I read all the tips and hints I could. Then I tried this.
(I'm not a tech but I am comfortable with technical concepts)

In my IPAD 2 (I don't know if this will work for others but it's safe to try and doesn't require hard reboots or restores)
NB: I was not worried about any musical artwork when I tried this - I just wanted my space back
In Itunes / go to Music tab / select all (command A for mac users) (with all music highlighted) right click / choose get info
… in the bottom right hand corner of the "multiple item information" box, you should see a square box for artwork
Make sure this is empty then…...
tick the small box next to artwork / select OK
This should remove all artwork from your music files and clear up "other"

Mine went from 10GB of "Other" back to a more reasonable 2GB

Hope this helps someone

L

Bit seriously: this is ridiculous. It doesn't make sense that "other" is pumped with more data than "music", "apps", and "photos" combined. It seems there is an issue with iOS 9.2 in this respect.

Does anyone find a real solution?