iPhone System taking up storage space

Just to share the latest. I have gone to "manually" managing my music, videos, etc. on my iPhone, which, while painful has eliminated the problem for me. I was able to do some digging using a third party program called Wondershare SafeEraser and verify that when iTunes is synching music, something doesn't finish correctly and therefore leaves all the transferred music files as non-mp3 files. Therefore Music can't find them and the System storage seems them as some set of temporary files. I can actually delete them using SafeEraser and get the storage back. However using iTunes to synch automatically always results in them getting stuck as "system" temp files. So therefore reverting to manually managing has fixed it for me for about 4 weeks now. Clearly an iTunes / iOS bug of some sort that is nasty... hopefully a fix will come soon.

Hi,

I had the same issue; please check for the following behaviours

1. When you open the iPhone Storage settings, the phone takes a long time populating the list and completing the category split

2. Some applications are missing from the list, and/or some are listing an unusually high storage usage value, expressed as a meaningless row of numbers like 10483947900478349204 which can't be a Gb value.

3. Some features in that app are not working; in my case: Whatsapp backup was not being completed as it asked for more space.

In my case, it was Whatsapp; sometimes it appeared with wrong storage values, sometimes it did not appear; it seems to me this started with failed backups due to network errors or interrupted backups; it then quickly escalates to being unable to backup Whatsapp, as more storage is needed to perform the backups

Resolution:

1. Try to find the space needed to complete that backup, this will allow you to void loosing any whatsapp data; choose to delete (including data) an app that's on top of the list which contains no "true" user-created data that cannot be restored from the Cloud, or choose to offload a few apps which are large (note that for some apps, user data is small, and the app is large. Good candidates for this: Spotify (just reinstall and re download local cache later), Email (if you are synching with the server). Consider selectively deleting media from group chat to make the backup smaller and make it fit.

2. Delete the app that has unreasonable storage or is not in the list; in my case, I removed Whatsapp. After you remove it, keep looking at the value for System Storage: I was over 28 Gb, it kept slowly but steadily getting smaller, to something around 14 Gb.

3. When you're absolutely sure it stops shrinking, restart the phone; reinstall Whatsapp. The backup will quickly reinstate all the messages, then will slowly restore all the media you had backed up.

4. Go to Storage Settings again: you'll notice the System Storage is still much smaller than before, and you should have plenty of space for future backups.

5. In Whatsapp, keep an eye on failed backup, as they may suggest something went wrong again.

Cheers.

I had this issue and found it was media within the GoPro app.

I deleted the gopro media from within the app and my system size returned to normal.

Because the media is not in the camera roll/photos app the iPhone sees it as system usage.

This could be similar for other audio/video apps, so check them first before doing anything crazy like a restore.

Hope this helps some people.

@ To all who are facing this odd issue of "System is taking too much space" (Mine was 15GB out of 16Gb)

I was struggling with the same issue for almost a month. I am on 6s, ios11, 16GB space.

I literally formatted by phone around 10 times, called Apple support multiple times, they opened ticket few times but nothing resolved this issue.

Then I started debugging by my own and fixed this issue.

The thing I did is

1. Formatted my phone (aka Factory reset)

2. Set it up as a new IPhone

3. Did not login to Icloud to restore any data.

Apparently Connecting my phone to my Icloud was making my system usage go crazy.

I would suggest to take a backup on mac (using iTunes though incase you want to get your old data back)

@ To all who are facing this odd issue of "System is taking too much space" (Mine was 15GB out of 16Gb)

I was struggling with the same issue for almost a month. I am on 6s, ios11, 16GB space.

I literally formatted by phone around 10 times, called Apple support multiple times, they opened ticket few times but nothing resolved this issue.

Then I started debugging by my own and fixed this issue.

The thing I did is

1. Formatted my phone (aka Factory reset)

2. Set it up as a new IPhone

3. Did not login to Icloud to restore any data.

Apparently Connecting my phone to my Icloud was making my system usage go crazy.

I would suggest to take a backup on mac (using iTunes though incase you want to get your old data back)

For most ...the solution is an easy one...if you have Facebook app on your phone...it will use up huge chunks of storage logging and temp files...as an example ...my phone showed Facebook taking 2.6GB...however after deleting Facebook app...you must go through Settings...General ...Storage...Apps...Facebook..delete...I actually recovered 8.5 GB ...you can watch that bar drop ..and bring back your space...whole thing takes about 2 minutes...then download FB app again from App Store...and your good to go...phone much faster as well...

Your iPhone/iPad continually builds up cache files and stores them through the storage section of the iPhone. To clear these files, open settings - general - reset - reset all settings. I lost no content in this process and changed my storage usage from 19.56GB to 9.27GB

Go to your settings then music and switch off “iCloud music library” and then switch it on again. I think it system files are the cache of all the songs you stream. I was able to reduce my system size from 23gb to 5gb

It is not abnormal for the iPhone system to use 5 or 6 Gb, but there is indeed a bug where the system storage can go to 20 Gb or more (mine was 40 Gb)! I believe that the iPhone system is not really taking all this space: the space is actually taken by your personal content (music, photos, apps, documents,...) and is wrongly assigned to the "iPhone system" in the storage menu of the iPhone settings. An easy fix is to connect your iPhone to your computer by USB and open iTunes. Just allow iTunes to access the phone data and wait a few minutes (or use the opportunity to back up your phone on your computer). Somehow, iTunes forces the iPhone to recalculate its storage. Then, if you check the iPhone storage menu, you will see that the system storage has decreased and that the storage of your personal content has increased.

My system services go through the roof when I use any social networking app (Facebook alone makes it jump extremely high), if background app refresh is on or location services - it's terrible. I typically keep these off but wanted to test it. WhatsApp is another I've noticed. If I don't close my pages out, which I'm infamous for but getting better at, I can count on system services going up.

I offload my apps every so often then reinstall which helps. I don't use background app refresh nor location services except for about three. And, I feel I'm constantly cleaning up my social media apps but it's become an easy task now. Weather app was another raising the limit too.

Now that I've gotten my settings suitable and more "static" in closing apps completely, etc after use for example and not allowing services like background app refresh and location services to run, all has improved greatly.

Then, I typically force restart especially after cleaning up my apps.

I did a total restore back to factory defaults and then restored from a backup and my iPhone 6S Plus is back to normal with 31GB of 64GB used. It has been stable at this regardless of which apps I use for about 10 days.

I had this problem with System using 31 GB on a 64 GB iPad. I found that deleting the Amazon Prime Video app (not just deleting videos within the app) and reinstalling it reduced my System size to 10.4 GB. Apparently Amazon is not trash collecting properly and passing the blame on to Apple.

Okay something I saw... I have the same issue with my settings are taking up 32GB of my iPhone X. But when I offloaded all my Apple Music downloaded songs my settings dropped to 0GB used. As soon as I downloaded songs again to my phone on Apple Music my settings sky rocketed again to 17GB

If "Other" is large (>500 MB) it means there is data corruption in your phone's storage. Most often this is caused by an interrupted iTunes sync or a sync that did not complete. The solution that usually works is to restore iOS from a backup using iTunes: Restore your iOS device from a backup - Apple Support

fazillatheef wrote:

Go below in storage you can see system storage. I think it is another Apple trick to buy iCloud subscription.

Total, utter nonsense. Buying additional iCloud storage will have no effect on the use of storage on your phone. If you add a terabyte to iCloud and look at the same image that you posted it will look exactly the same.

Further, System and Other are not the same thing.

If you want to fix the problem instead of posting nonsense conspiracy theories just restore your phone from a backup using iTunes: Restore your iOS device from a backup - Apple Support