Q: Documents & Data

I suppose the lack of a "delete all messages for this account" button in Mail may just be a sloppy omission.  However, I wonder whether it is more a reflection of the hubris of being unwilling to admit imperfection.  This would be exactly what one might have expected from Apple in the Jobs era, particularly after reading the excerpt that appeared today from the forthcoming book “The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs”.

It would say good things about Apple if they got past the tendancy to ask "What would Steve do?" and added such a button.  It could be described as a supercharged version of clearing the trash, without conceding that it is meant to clean up after an error by Apple.

My biggest offender is my text messages.  I need to free up space but I look up things in the history of my texts all the time.  Any thoughts on how to free up space while still maintaining access to all of the information contained in the texts? 

Hey tyvoyles - sorry, don't have a solution - but I SO wish I did.  I use my text history a LOT for work... I realize some don't, so they scoff and wonder why I have kept so many of my texts.  They haven't spent a day in my shoes, needing information for my job, that can easily be found from a conversation within a text.  I'm hoping SOMEONE comes along and can give us BOTH insight.  Thanks for asking.

I am wondering the same thing - why nothing has changed before and after the update and I went from having so much room to nothing. Did you figure any solution out yet?

this might be because the update puts a few things on it

the one thing i dont get with ios 7 is that it says you need 2 gigs of space to download it but it only takes 600 kb im pretty sure. but its annoying

All of the reply posts have focused on the issue with Messages. I had that issue previously and I deleted several Message with pictures and videos. That worked just after the initail IOS 7 release. I recovered memory taken up by the mysterious Other.

Recently (Today) the memory issue on the Phone returned and the Messages solution was NOT the issue. The only solution which worked was usuing the 'Restore iPhone' in iTunes. Prior to restoring the phone the memory status showed 412mb of free storage. After restoring, my phone now has 4.61GB of free stroage. The Documnets and Data was 3GB and now its is 74.9mb. Other was 2.7GB and it is now at 1.39GB

BEFORE restoring the phone, I recommend backing the phone up to the hard drive of your computer through iTunes, and more importanly taking copies of photos and videos off the phone directly and saving them to your computer, either through iPhoto, Picasa or other photo software. (To do this with the USB thunderbolt wire connected directly to the phone and computer)

Note that a Restore of the phone will take time, as it will download and update any new IOS 7 updates, then a re-start and then you need to Restore Backup from you hard drive and sync. The last step will depend on the number Apps previousluy on the phone.

Clearly there is a bug in the IOS 7 software which affects a number of phones. It is unfortunate, and one could argue that it should not happen. The fact of the matter is that computers are finicky and don't always performe as desired / advertised. Frustrating, to ay the least.

Thanks for the tip - do we know if there is any plans for a fix coming in an update or is this some backhanded ploy to force us into earlier upgrades or something? Why has it become so tedious?

I wish I had answer for you. I hope my tip will help a few iphone owners, but I am as mystified as everyone else is as to why this occurs. Certainly the lack of controll or ability to delete items or access areas of the software is by design. Apple has always been clear that iOS and the hardware devices are closed systems so that Apple can insure / controll the user expereince.

Go to settings --> icloud --> Documents and Data --> OFF

Hope this helps!!

I had the same issue and it turned out that I had 3+GB of old text messages. After clearing them out I can video tape my kids Christmas concerts again!

I had 4.3 gigs showing on mail despite an empty inbox, sent and trash.  I deleted and reinstalled my account and now only 296 meg

And no painful reset.....happy day.

All of the little tips about clearing a couple of documents the hard way are well and good, however, the root problem is something that Apple has refused to address. The lack of simple document clearing of junk files on Apple devices is nonsensical, I'm not a huge Android fan, but this space maintenance basic function has always been easy do do on those devices WITHOUT the ridiculous practice of uninstalling and reinstalling apps!

has anyone considered the possibility that Apple is not fixing this bug or adding a feature to delete this useless data because it gets people to buy larger phones and to buy new phones sooner.  This is about money.  Apple see's this as a good problem to ignore.  more money in their pocket.

I just got off the phone with Applecare about this subject. The person I spoke to, said that the "other" in itunes, would be pictures in text messages that should be deleted. As for "Documents and Data", he made it seem to me, that it is a known issue and that they are working on fixing it, in a future update. As for now, the only suggestion he had, was to have me restore the phone as new and then he could walk me through getting everything back to how it was. The only thing I would lose he said, was the messages. That is not an option for my wife. I do have her going through her messages and deleting all the attached pictures in there, to free up space from the "Other". We will see how well this works.

Unfortunately, you may have to clear out more than just the attached pictures in the messages.

My largest Usage was Messages as well.  I tried the Backup/Restore method, which took care of most of the 'Other', but didn't clean out the 5.4GB of message data.  So I started removing the oldest messages first, got up to about a months worth of history.  Down to 5.1GB.  Then I systematically removed all of the attachments in the conversations left.  Stayed at 5.1GB.  I realized that the pictures I removed were small and didn't even add up to 100 MB.

Then I decided who cares, I'll remove them all.  After I removed the last conversation....BAM.  Down to only 75MB in my Messages.  The last one I removed?  It was my wifes, which got me to thinking:

1)  My wife and I text each other a lot, which is better than us texting other people.

2)  I had never deleted her conversation from my messages before.  While it only 'showed' about 20 messages back and forth, there was the option to "Load More Messages".  Perhaps my phone had stored the entirety of our texts, which could have gone back 2-3 years.  That is one long text string, full of photos and videos that I didn't realize were still there.  And if I backed up and old iPhone and got a new one, would it pass on that 5.4GB of old texts to the new phone?

If this is true, it would nice if Apple made a setting to remove old messages after a year or something to that sort.  Or maybe allow an archive limit based on space.  If I have a 16GB iPhone, I don't want more that 3GB of that to be old messages.