iPhone 13 Pro Bloated messages local storage (+30GB) after direct transfer

[Exces6]

I did a device-to-device transfer to setup my new iPhone (XS to 13 Pro), and Messages local storage is about 30GB larger on my new phone than on the old one. Seems to be related to videos but my threads list looks identical on each phone. Has anyone had a similar issue?

Could it be a glitch related to indexing that should resolve over the next few days? Or perhaps messages in the database on my old device that weren't properly counted? My old phone (256 GB) was almost full, but even the iTunes backup I made before transferring was only 243 GB, so I'm surprised to see 285 GB as the total used on the new device.

The list of every video in Messages won't load on either phone so I can't tell exactly what's at play here. I don't really want to introduce 30GB more bloat to my phone or iCloud storage if it isn't actually message data, so I've given some thought to just doing a clean iCloud restore tomorrow to see if that helps. I have iMessage in iCloud turned on so in theory everything is stored there properly, though I'm unclear on whether it downloads all history to the device or keeps it in the cloud.

Notably, iCloud reports 155.4 GB in Messages, but I can't tell if this includes family usage or not.

Thanks in advance!

Old phone:

New phone:

iCloud:

 

[Taz Mangus]

Did you do the software update before of after you did the phone to phone transfer?

 

[Exces6]

Did you do the software update before of after you did the phone to phone transfer?

Old phone was (and still is) on 14.8, new phone came with 15.0 out of the box.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Your phone came with the 15 RC. Apple actually has a day zero software update for the iPhone 13. If you have not done a software update since you setup your phone your probably should do that then do erase all contents and then setup the phone using phone to phone transfer again. When I got my 13 Pro Max, the first thing I did before transferring over my data from my old phone was to do a software update. I then did a erase all content and setup the 13 using phone to phone transfer.

 

[richxps]

Same issue with mine along with my app drawer apps are mostly in other now and also the photo widget keeps coming back to my stack even after deleting.

 

[Exces6]

Interestingly, I updated my old device to iOS 15 last night in preparation to do a fresh restore as suggested above, and the old device is showing the same size Messages as the new device (82 GB). This plus photos is more than total storage on the old phone so maybe it is some kind of glitch. Running a PC backup of the new phone now to see if there actually is more phantom data on the new phone.

 

[Exces6]

Update: A full restore from iTunes helped fix the subcategories, although the total storage was still 40GB more than my old phone's capacity. Over the past few days Messages dropped from 80 GB to 18 GB (probably due to indexing), although my overall space used is still creeping upwards from 280 GB. Not sure why it's so much larger than the capacity of my old phone but at least the subcategories seem to be leveling off. At one point the initial restore (device-to-device transfer) bloated photos up to 270 GB in size alone!