Orphaned data ending up as "Other" and filling all available free space
Hi, I have an iPhone 4s (64Gb) and have been happily syncing with iTunes 11.4 while on iOS 7, which includes roughly 40Gb of music, 5Gb of apps, and 5Gb of photos that I like to carry around. Since the iOS 8 upgrade, however, I've noticed that syncing was a little slower, especially during the initial "waiting for sync to start" and final "waiting for changes to be applied" steps. I didn't think too much of it, as it generally would complete the steps, eventually.
Last week I had a particularly large music change (and subsequent data update) and got impatient during the longer-than-usual wait time during sync. So in the middle of the sync I changed my music selections to reduce the amount of data requiring transfer and hit the 'sync' button again, with the idea it would simplify the data exchange and get me out the door quicker. Unfortunately the opposite happened. Suddenly ALL of my music switched from "Audio" data (in blue on the data graph within iTunes) to "Other" data (in yellow). When I explored the music app on the phone, the music was completely gone, zero songs, although the playlists were still present. Clearly the file list had become corrupted somehow.
When I re-synced no change occurred to this "Other" data, including when I removed all music selections, or changed things slightly, and re-synced. And because there was now 40Gb of orphaned data in the phone, when I attempted to re-add my music I was told there was not enough space on the device. Additional info:
- When viewing Settings - Usage, the amount of music data displayed was exactly what it "thought" was on the phone, in other words, when I had unselected all the music and synced, it thought there was no music files present.
- When viewing Settings - Usage, there was no indication in the list of items of any large files or groups of files - it was as if this "Other" data was hidden from the knowledge of this Usage feature.
- Turning off/on the phone made no difference to this "Other" data
- Unselecting all data in iTunes and syncing, then re-selecting the data, made no difference to this "Other" data
- Restoring from the latest backup made no difference because the latest backup was AFTER this problem had occurred, so it simply restored 40Gb of "Other" data as well as all the other settings.
The only solution I could think of was to restore the phone entirely, which I did. I went through a complete refresh from scratch over the past couple days, and was just beginning to enjoy the phone once again when it happened again. Again!! Although I was very careful over the past couple days to not interrupt the sync process wantonly, I did have to stop it once, and I think that's what killed it for me. While it was syncing just this past time, I hit the 'Cancel' icon in iTunes to cancel the sync, and even hit the 'Eject' icon to safely eject the device, and it choked. I now once again have about 40Gb of orphaned "Other" data which is clogging the phone, and no apparent way to clean this up.
To summarize:
It appears for the iPhone 4s on iOS 8 any interruption of the sync process (either "safely" by hitting the 'Cancel' icon or 'Sync' button or more roughly by pulling the phone out of the dock) can jeopardize your data on the phone, creating orphaned files and thereby an usually large amount of "Other" data that is impossible to clean up.
Any ideas on how to fix this besides doing a complete restore would be greatly appreciated. I could go through the hassle of restoring again, but I have no faith it won't happen once again either sooner or later.
Kind regards,
Brian
iPhone 4S, iOS 8, 64Gb
