Storage space on my phone is disappearing

And the memory isn't disappearing again after that?

I watch a lot of video (films and TV shows obtained from iTunes) on my iPad Pro to relax when I've finished work, and I'd been suffering terribly from inexplicably vanishing free memory (though it took me a while to fully appreciate the extent of the problem).

A few months ago, my iPad Pro developed a faulty screen (lots of banding and flickering) and was replaced under Apple Care. I took the opportunity at the time to get Apple to replace my 128GB model with a 256GB one because I was getting low on storage and hadn't appreciated that this cacheing problem existed. The upgrade cost me the price difference between the two models: £100.

Imagine my surprise when, some months later, having downloaded only a few more apps on the 256GB iPad Pro, I suddenly discovered that I was running out of memory again! I hadn't really appreciated that there must be a storage-eating bug in iOS until my 256GB iPad Pro inexplicably filled up!

So now that I've hunted for info on the problem, I'm really pleased to find the solution here, and that it's so simple. However, I'm also rather cheesed off that I've paid £100 unnecessarily to double my iPad's storage when actually it was completely unnecessary to do that.

Believe it or not, by following the quick tip here (i.e. signing out of iTunes and back in again), I've instantly regained ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY GIGABYTES (yes, 140GB) of free storage!!!

To be clear, this is about cached data that the user hasn't knowingly cached. Saying "store your media files on the cloud or laptop" (why only laptop? – you mean local storage, just not on the iOS device) doesn't really address the issue. If people had downloaded movies etc., they'd naturally expect them to eat up space on the device.

If you look at my previous comment, half a dozen above, you'll see that this bug manage to eat up 140GB of my 256GB iPad Pro before I worked out what was happening.

That was ALL a result of streaming video (over a long period) from iTunes – films and TV programmes I'd rented or bought. I didn't 'download' anything as such, so I had no expectation that it would be cached 'forever' on the device. This was all iTunes streaming.

The fortunately simple solution is just to log out of iTunes in Settings, wait for the unwanted data to be purged and then log back in again. (Presumably to repeat the process later when it again becomes a problem.)

Apple should certainly fix this problem. For one thing, it caused me to needlessly waste £100 (see previous post).

same here, i am using Iphone 6 plus 8.1.1. The message was send to my phone too. The question was everytime i get that message i check my storage its "FULL" but when i wait for few minutes and check it again. Its back to "NORMAL" with "2GB" spaces less. But this message never stop, it sent to me every few hours. Happen more than few weeks, i dont know where the storage go while i am not looking or even touching on my phone.

Try pressing the Home and Power button down for 8 seconds or until the Apple logo comes up. If this does not work then try hooking up the phone to a computer and look under iTunes and find out where all the space is going. If all else fails backup you iPhone on you computer and reset it then use the backup to get all your picture games etc. back.

log out of itunes store in settings, wait 10 minutes, then log back in. your storage should go back to what it should have been all along. there is an itunes media caching bug / storage leak in ios 8 (all versions so far), and apple for some reason has decided it isn't worth fixing.

YES, this is it. That fancy music cloud they built must be creeping into my iPhone, because as soon as I signed out of iTunes & App Store my available storage went from 108MB to 3.0GB. Whoa.

And come to think of it, this started happening around the time I started listening to a lot of music on my phone again. So now that I've deleted months' worth of pictures and a bunch of apps, it turns out all I had to do was go to Setting > iTunes & App Store, then click my Apple ID, then choose Sign Out.

Oh, Apple. At least TELL US about this stuff.

Yeah same exact thing happens to mine whenever I'm signed in to the Apple Store, which I need in order to listen to Apple Music. It's super frustrating, and restoring didn't help at all and it always decreases until it hits 0mb. They really need to fix this!!!

I just want to emphasize that this was the (temporary) solution to the problem of disappearing storage on my iPad. After signing out of iTunes, over 30 gb became available.

My storage kept on disappearing overnight. I deleted pictures, Apps, turned off Photo, iCloud, etc. but it didn't seem to help.

My problem turned out to be that GMAIL was trying to Archive deleted messages to "On My Phone". I also didn't move deleted messages

to Trash until they were a month old.

Settings >> Mail, Contacts, Calendars >> (for all GMAIL accounts) >> Account >> Advanced >> set Deleted Mailbox to "Trash" and Archive Mailbox to "Deleted Messages" and Move Discarded Messages into "Deleted Mailbox" and not "Archive Mailbox"

Hope this helps.

That does not work, because whatever it is that eats the space is then included in back up and comes straight back when you restore your phone.

I Am also having same problem, I actually watched 155mb of space disappear in front of my eyes by pressing manage storage and then back and then back into setting again. Each time I did that more space vanished. Phone tells me I have 0 bytes left yet when I total up my apps I am not even close to half full, I even deleted 5 large apps and it still told me I had 0 bytes, so either Apple are loading some spyware in the background or some app is using it all, I honestly can't tell. But if I buy a phone which says it has X amount of space on it I expect X amount not Y or Z. It's already annoying that nearly some of yr advertised space on phone is already used by the system. Cannot see why they cannot fit 2 storage areas, one for system and one for user. Storage chips are small enough to do this now

Thank you so much