Why do deleted messages still take up 5 GB of space?

Go to Setting>Messages>Message History> Choose 30 days. It will delete the ones taking up your storage. You can switch it back to Forever if you don't want your new messages deleted in 30 days.

You are a genius, 😎 thanks for this. I struggled forever & came across this reply - thanks! (Now to just delete all my emails to also free some space....let the head scratching begin!😕)

AFTER MONTHS OF STRUGGLING, I FINALLY DISCOVERED A FIX FOR THIS! TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

To fix this, I followed everyone's instructions and simply tried to just delete the messages, but whenever I reset my phone, the messages would just reappear. I attributed this to the fact that my iCloud was still on. The obvious solution to this seemed to be to just turn off my iCloud backup briefly so the messages I wanted to delete would no longer reappear. I did this but the space taken up by Messages in the Usage section of Settings did not decrease, and the deleted messages ended up reappearing. In a final attempt to resolve this issue, I went into each individual message and used the "Delete All" option. This seemed to be the only way that I could delete messages, gain back the space taken up by the messages, and not restore my phone. Tedious but effective.

Impatient readers skip to here: I turned off my iCloud backup temporarily and individually deleted all messages from WITHIN the message threads themselves. I subsequently turned back on my iCloud backup and all my iPhone problems were solved!

I deleted all texts manually and still had 15gb listed as SAVED! I went to SETTINGS, MSGS and changed the FOREVER to 30DAYS and it immediately decreased the size below 1GB! Then I went back in and changed it back to FOREVER.

Problem solved!

I've tried the above, and still no avail!

I've deleted all my messages and it still reads 500MB as Messages (Saved) despite having deleted everything and changing my expire message settings to 30 days.

Does anyone have a fix at all?

but short of restoring my phone...

There is no big deal about restoring your phone, as long as you have taken the huge amounts of advice about ensuring all your data is backed up and thus easily restored.

Go to iTunes and try to buy or rent a movie with more memory needs than your device has available. Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers requires more than 6 gigs. You will be informed you do not have enough memory, and this will clear memory caches, especially email ones, freeing up more memory. Do this more than 1 time.

D

HI, the only explanation I can think of is that the messages that are taking up that space isn't older than 30 days - so perhaps keep trying that for the next couple of weeks or again in 30 days... maybe then it'll be gone? I've tried everything before & have never deleted them as described above & when I did, it was gone! Now I do it more regularly but it doesn't necessarily go away straight away... because it's not older than 30 days at that stage.

I'm no expert on this & rely a lot on advice on this forum from people who are clued up. But that's the only advice I have.

Good luck - I hope you figure it out! What usually almost always works too is after doing eve you need to do, either re your phone, or do a backup & restore that back up. I had a similar problem with "other" data that I couldn't get rid of. (The yellow bar) & After restoring my most recent backup - it worked fine!

Hope this helped!

I was told today why I didn't like answer make sense buy more storage is what I must do problem solvrs

Any luck on this yet? My 5 has 10.7 GB in saved messages!! Crazy, huh? HELP!