iPhone System taking up storage space

I think the is actually a problem with third party apps not collecting garbage properly (i.e. not clearing deleted files & releasing storage), based on my experience with amazon video noted above. With five iOS devices in the household the only ones that have had this problem are the two with lots of third party video apps.

I just encountered this problem today, a few days after my (very, very late) upgrade to iOS 11.4. I've had my current iPhone 8 for about a year and a half and just never upgraded because I've had issues in the past after upgrading....I guess I should have gone with my instinct -_-

I have some details that I hope will be enlightening, on the off chance that there are actually Apple devs reading this, trying to fix the problem that tens of thousands of their customers are having:

I have a semi-popular youtube channel, for which i do at least 3 or 4 uploads a week, and I film all of the videos on my iPhone. A lot of the videos are about an hour long before I edit them, so I have always meticulously kept a lot of space free in my phone so that I can make videos when I need to. In my endeavor to manipulate my phone's storage at will, I learned several years ago that deleting certain apps like facebook and then reinstalling will get you some space back. For some reason people are suggesting that in this thread, but that's totally unrelated to the "Other" or "System Storage.

Just today, for the first time since updating my phone to the new iOS 11.4, I filmed an hour and 1 minute of footage on my iPhone, and then as I always do, tried to copy the video to my computer so I could edit it easily on there. This didn't work, when it normally does. So I resorted to editing it on my phone, and the edited ended up being 16 minutes. I deleted the 1 hour and 1 minutes of video that I no longer needed since I had the edited version, and also deleted it from the "Recently Deleted" folder. It was right at this moment when my "System Storage" skyrocketed. It had always been around 4 or 5 gigs, but now it's at 23 gigs. Mysteriously just about how much it would be if I dumped a 1 hour and 1 minute video into it, on top of the original 4-5 gigs.

23 gigs of my 32 gig storage is now taken up by the "System Storage", and nothing from this thread is fixing that. I am not able to make any videos for my youtube channel until I fix this issue. And I have schedule-sensitive things to film soon, which I will simply not be able to film because of this bug.

From my research, this bug has been around for several months now. You guys are seriously blowing it Apple. If there's no fix soon, I'll have no choice but to go with another brand.

fazillatheef wrote:

So 4982 people who marked this problem have a hardware problem.. not a software issue that needs fixing

I don't know where you got that number, but lets run with it. There are roughly 1.2 billion iPhones out there. That's 1,200,000,000. So 4,982 divided by 1,200,000,000 is 0.000004, or 0.0004% of users. 0.0004% of users with a hardware problem doesn't sound out of line. And if you read carefully what I wrote, I said that the most common cause is an interrupted sync, which is not a hardware problem.

But whine on, rather than doing something to fix it. You could have fixed it 10 times over in the time it has taken you to argue about it.

Just turn off iCloud drive in you settings!

I told you what the problem is. There is nothing further anyone can do. You must delete your thousands of messages if you want to recover the data in the System category that is stuff you put there.

Sometimes, deleting old back-ups and deleting photo or image attachments will clear space on iPhone.

My iPhones ‘settings’ are using 36GB of my storage. Can’t back up on iTunes or iCloud and restore my phone as iTunes doesn’t recognise it and iCloud is already full. Did u get an answer how to solve this?

My iPhone 6S has 64gb of storage and 39gb is in use by "other" files. I have updated to latest version of iOS (11.2), I have synced it with my iTunes... I have done backup and restored it but so far nothing has helped me to reclaim that amount of storage. I've been reading and searching all over the web about system files, log files, diagnostics and many more... I've disabled almost everything in the phone and still it's using 60% (39gb) of the storage which is absurd even if you consider logs and so on.

I have I phone 7 running the latest iOS. Other was taking up over 10 GB. I deleted a bunch of pictures and it went down to 6. And I have six GB of total memory used by apps and photos. It seems that the other category is the exact same size as all my other apps and photos combined. I did a factory reset and re-installed everything from iTunes and the other category came back exactly the same size. I don’t think the factory reset and restore from iTunes does anything. So my 32 GB phone is really only 16 GB phone now .

Has anyone found a solution that doesn’t require to update/restart? That should be an ultimate solution right?

My system storage took all the available space 3 times during the last month that was fixed by updating/restoring.

The last 2 happened after opening Google Photos to upload pics. Uninstalling it doesn’t help.

One of my friend bought a 128 gb iPhone 7 because he hated seeing the memory low issue. Even he got this error and was asking me if he should buy iCloud subscription to backup his photos and videos. When I checked his phone I showed him that his photos were not the issues.

He has never used iTunes and he installed it to do the restore as per my instructions. It worked for him and after two weeks he is back to square one.

Now I noticed my issue because of his phone. I am sure it is something caused by an update. You will soon see many other users , just give it some time.

I won't censor anything, I'm just a user like you. It doesn't matter whether it's a bug or not, only you can fix it. Well, not really, you could make a genius bar appointment and they will fix it for you, using the same process described multiple times in this thread.

You have 2 choices: Fix the problem, which will only take a few minutes, or live on with your righteous indignation and continue using a phone with half it's memory unusable.

You can reinstall, reset, restore... the system will always take the space. I have this problem on all decices. And talking about huge space like 40-80 GB. I have no time to restore my devices thwice a month.

I am also still having this problem in iOS 12.1.1. On my iPhone 6S I have 7.5 of 16 GB filled with "System" data.

I've tried: a hard reset, backing up with iTunes, leaving it connected to iTunes for a while, a factory reset and backup from iTunes (this got back some space, < 1 GB), and deleting as many apps and data files as possible (which is not related to the issue of course).

Apple Associates on this forum, in store, and on the phone have said that this is how it should function, that 4-8GB of System files is normal, or that I should buy a new phone (of course).

There are 2 options I haven't tried: resetting and setting it up as a new iPhone (because this would require deleting all app data and not restoring it, with the exception of things stored in iCloud) and erasing the device to recovery mode (how-to recently published here). I'll give the recovery mode a try and see what happens, was hoping to find a better answer here though.

So I had this problem on my Iphone 6 - too much space taken up by Other.

I did take it to the Genuis Bar. They suggested backup, factory reset, restore from backup -- I did that twice (I used Itunes, not Icloud), with no effect / improvement.

I now have an Iphone XS with 256GB storage, less than 1.5 months old. It shows the same issue --right now its 50.7GB of System Usage (iphone) or 31GB (per Itunes).

And yes, I have tried all the steps suggested here as well as by members of the Genuis Bar on the new phone as well -- it does not work.

So its obvious, this is not a hardware issue - new iphone XS (plus a factory reset on the old iphone 6 cleared the problem on the old phone).

It certainly appears like this is a software problem -- and none of the suggested solutions fix it for me (and I am presuming for the many other posters on this thread).

Should I assume all of this is due to software corruption -- that is getting transferred from phone to phone via backup restore ?

And the only way to fix this is to do a factory restore without restore -- which means I lose a significant amount of content ?

Any thoughts ?