Freeing up space on the root iPhone filesystem

[brentpeters]

Hey all,

I'm running a jailbroken iPhone 5 running iOS 6.1.4. I am one of the less fortunate with a 16gb device, so I'm always strapped for space.

Based on the apps I have installed on the device, and lack of music/photos/etc, I knew something wasn't adding up... So I mounted my iPhone as a disk and did a directory breakdown, and I found that:

/var/mobile/media/Downloads totals 1.3gb (a single filename consisting of random numbers taking up the majority of this space)
/var/mobile/media/PhotoData totals 0.6gb

I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of these folders, and whether they're okay to delete.

Cheers,
Brent

 

[869639]

Hey all,

I'm running a jailbroken iPhone 5 running iOS 6.1.4. I am one of the less fortunate with a 16gb device, so I'm always strapped for space.

Based on the apps I have installed on the device, and lack of music/photos/etc, I knew something wasn't adding up... So I mounted my iPhone as a disk and did a directory breakdown, and I found that:

/var/mobile/media/Downloads totals 1.3gb (a single filename consisting of random numbers taking up the majority of this space)
/var/mobile/media/PhotoData totals 0.6gb

I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of these folders, and whether they're okay to delete.

Cheers,
Brent

Correct me if I'm wrong but it may be iOS 7+ files that may have automatically downloaded on the iPhone, as that was an issue many users on iOS 6 [Including 6.x.x] and below had reported.

 

[brentpeters]

Correct me if I'm wrong but it may be iOS 7+ files that may have automatically downloaded on the iPhone, as that was an issue many users on iOS 6 [Including 6.x.x] and below had reported.

That actually makes perfect sense. Thanks. I went ahead and deleted that file and recovered the space!

 

[brentpeters]

For anyone else experiencing a similar problem, I can also confirm that deleting /var/mobile/media/PhotoData/Thumbnails is safe. I still went ahead and made a backup, just in case. But it seems that there were a bunch of thumbnails for photos that no longer existed, hence the filesystem bloat.