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Documents and Data taking up all storage on iPhone

A few days ago, I tried to send an email with a large attachment. However, it wasn't sending so I deleted my email account from my iPhone. After I did this, I got a message saying that almost all of my storage was used up. I checked to see and I only had about 5gb available from 64gb. I plugged my iPhone to my computer to check what was taking up all this space and 45gb of my space is being taken up by Documents and Data. I have deleted old messages, imported pictures to my computer and deleted them, clearing my history on safari, logging out of iCloud, and deleting most of my apps as I have read that deleting apps and later re-downloading them helps. I also updated to iOS 9.3. This helped very little. Documents and Data is now taking up only 43gb instead of 45gb. Before this happened, I had about 50gb free and now I have just 5gb free after this happened.



What else can I do to clear more of the Documents and Data? Should I restore my iPhone to one of the backups that I have saved? Should I take my iPhone to the Apple Store since it happened so suddenly and randomly?

Posted on Mar 24, 2016 11:02 AM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Mar 24, 2016 11:09 AM

On the Phone, go to Settings App > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage (under STORAGE). That will provide a list of what apps are using data and how much. Tapping on the app with give you the Data amount the app contains (minus itself), and in most cases the ability to delete the app if you wish. You will not necessarily need to delete the app.


Once you have completed any actions, try a forced restart: Simultaneously hold down the Home and On buttons until the device shuts down. Ignore the off slider if it appears. Once shut down is complete, if it doesn't restart on it own, turn the device back on using the On button. In some cases it also helps to double click the Home button and close all apps BEFORE doing the restart.


Also, actually syncing to iTunes will clear some of that out.


One last thing, if you have WhatsApp installed, there is a known issue that cases it to run up rather large amounts of data storage.

2 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Mar 24, 2016 11:09 AM in response to rosegoldshine

On the Phone, go to Settings App > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage (under STORAGE). That will provide a list of what apps are using data and how much. Tapping on the app with give you the Data amount the app contains (minus itself), and in most cases the ability to delete the app if you wish. You will not necessarily need to delete the app.


Once you have completed any actions, try a forced restart: Simultaneously hold down the Home and On buttons until the device shuts down. Ignore the off slider if it appears. Once shut down is complete, if it doesn't restart on it own, turn the device back on using the On button. In some cases it also helps to double click the Home button and close all apps BEFORE doing the restart.


Also, actually syncing to iTunes will clear some of that out.


One last thing, if you have WhatsApp installed, there is a known issue that cases it to run up rather large amounts of data storage.

Documents and Data taking up all storage on iPhone

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