Storage data different on iPhone and iTunes

I have this problem too. My iTunes shows 4 GB of free space and my iPhone 6s only 100 MB. I had to restore it and then it works. But only one week after my iPhone shows only 2 GB of free space and every day it decrease. It is crazy to restore the iPhone every 3-4 weeks. And I can't understand why this issue is not fixed yet. Battery Doctor app is now completely useless to fix this problem.

My iPhone 5s,(16GB, iOS 9.3.1) must be one hot mess!...

I cleaned out my Safari cache, removed all duplicate songs/photos, etc.

The phone itself reports 100mb, iTunes sees 290mb free, and Windows sees only 80!

What's going on here?? And should we really need another app to rectify it?

THIS is the answer, Averysgrammy! As you said: "Settings / iTunes & App Store" - Sign out of your account, then sign back in. I just freed up about 5GB on my 16GB iPhone. I can take photos again! Yay!!! How easy was that? And how unintuitively ridiculous that it needs to be done this way? A small, cynical part of me wants to think this is Apple's way of getting people to purchase iCloud storage, but I'm sure they would reply that keeping these caches somehow "helps" us... Oh, well whatever... THANK YOU for the simple solution Averysgrammy! P.S. I have Battery Doctor and have tried clearing space with it, but the results are minimal and temporary. It is a fine app but not the solution to this problem, in my opinion.

Holy cr@p, I can't believe the "rent a movie that's too big for your phone" trick in that Macworld link worked!

My phone said it had about 1GB available, whereas iTunes said it had 10 GB. I signed out of iCloud and iTunes a few times, and that got me to about 3GB. I then tried to rent two movies that were larger than the supposed space I had on the phone.

Right hand to Loki, that got me nearly 5.5 GB back! I honestly did not think that would work. As other people have alluded to, it sounds like Apple has a problem with clearing caches off of their phones.

Thanks again for the tip.

I fixed this same issue with my iPad, which said it only had 200 mb left in storage while iTunes said it had 4 GB free.

I just restored my iPad through iTunes. Backed everything up in my computer first. Once it was fully restored and then reinstalled all my apps, email, etc. automatically, the device showed almost 10 GB free!! The free storage on my device in settings and iTunes now match! Hope this helps.

I was able to do this download a file that's too big trick by downloading a game my son has that was too big. (Pixel Gun 3D is approx 1.7GB) It worked just the same as trying to download a movie without the risk of being charged for the rental. It took three tries but progressively went from 100mb of free space to 1.4GB of free space which roughly matches what iTunes has been telling me all along was my free space.

Signing out and then in again deleted all my downloaded music and Playlists in Music. (About 10gb)

That's a real bummer as I am away from wifi for an extended period and redowloading 10gb is a long process.

DONT DO THIS IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR DOWNLOADED MUSIC ON YOUR PHONE.

This is a REALLY BAD fix.

All it does is erase all your downloaded DRM (Digital Rights Managed) music. Which will then reaload over cell networks and eat up all your data or over wifi if you have it.

It surprises me that signing out and then back in erases all your DRM managed music. Contacts, settings, email, all remain, but 10gb of music gone. A whole afternoon re downloading......

Just a tip:

When you take photos from within iMessage those photos are cached separately from your Camera Roll that is located in the Photos icon! This might explain why some of you are witnessing your available free space slowly drop even when you haven't browsed that much, taken photos with the camera itself, or not added any media(music, movies, books).

I freed up over 100mb of space on my iPhone 5s by deleting the photos from my conversations in iMessage.

1. Go to a conversation.

2. Tap 'Details'(Upper RH corner on most devices).

3. Scroll down until you see allllll those photos you messaged to that person.

4. Press and hold one photo for about 2 seconds, or until options 'copy|delete|more' appear. Release.

5. Select photos you want to save if you want them in your camera roll folder. A blue circled checkmark will appear by each.

6. Press 'Save' at bottom.

OR

5. Select photos you want to delete.

6. Press Garbage can icon to delete, and confirm

I was shocked at how much space this freed up, and I'm a power user, as you can see by how much free space I have on my iDevices, lol!

Update:

In the last two hours, I've got my iPhone 5s memory to read as follows - progress!...

The phone itself now reports 252mb,

iTunes sees 468.4mb free,

and Windows sees 251mb.

So it's the same ratio between the three, because iTunes's reading also went up along with the phone and Windows.

At least Windows and the device itself are now withing a MB of each other.

But there's still a mystery difference somewhere.

Hey check this out. So here's a way easy fix that doesn't involve downloading Apps that want access to your data or rebooting the whole system. I read this somewhere else ages ago and just tried it and it seems to still work a treat....

- You check how much Available space it says you have. (In my case 1.68Gb on the phone and 2.46Gb on iTunes?!)

- Go to the iTUNES STORE and find a MOVIE which you KNOW is much bigger (I chose something that was 5.48Gb)

- You click "BUY" (Don't panic, the transaction won't go through)

- Then you wait for the Phone to tell you "you don't have enough space"

- And when you go back to check usage BINGO BANGO all is resolved!

Strange but true.

At least that's what happened with me.

It was painful, but I managed to clear up tons of extra space, enough to update to 11. First I did a backup. Then, I went into Settings>Messages> and set 'Keep Messages' to 1 year instead of forever. It cleared about 1.2GB for me, then I flicked it back on per my preference. Hope this helps someone. Cheers

This worked perfectly. This method cleared all my cache (Junk Files). I went from 1.32GB of space on my iPhone to 7.15GB of space on the phone. It took a little time, maybe 10 minutes in all. I had already performed a BackUp using iTunes earlier. So maybe in all 15 minutes. I had to rekey in all my passwords for email. Have to wait for all my apps to reinstall, but the phone is back to running normal and with tons of more space. I have an iPhone 6+ and using version 10.2.1. I am not installing the latest version. Thanks for this remedy!! YOU ROCK!!!!!

i had this problem also but have managed to sort it out.

Not sure how the decoupling came about but i'm thinking it might be because at one point i had my phone backing up to iCloud...that's just a speculation. did you ever back up to iCloud?

in any case, the steps i took to rectify the situation were:

1) back up phone

2) in iTunes, uncheck the categories of things (eg. books, music, tv shows) being synced

3) from phone look to see what's taking up space that iTunes is responsible for... to do this go: settings -> general -> usage -> storage

4) delete the stuff on there you don't want sitting on there...in my case it was some audiobooks in the music section...(i think they were there from ages ago - i had unchecked them in iTunes some time back)

5) go back to iTunes, re-check the categories of things (e.g. books, tv shows etc) you want synced.

6) sync iphone

- you might be able to just go into the usage folder yourself and identify stuff in there that is not accounted for by iTunes...but i think the method above is less tedious.

please let me know if it works for you...

good luck!

I have this problem but on my phone there are no books/music or other documents.

In iTunes no categories are checked/synced.

My music is on iCloud.

I have photos and I was thinking that this may be the problem. I have therefore disabled photo stream but the gap between phone storage and iTunes is still there. The difference is around 2 GB.

I also have 1.9 GB of Other field, visible on iTunes.

After 2 years of usage I feel like my iPhone 5s needs a hard reset but I really do not understand why this issue is there.