So yesterday I purchased the iPhone 6 Plus 16GB from T-Mobile and got home to set it up an hour later. When I connected it to iTunes I was surprised to see that I had 5.34GB of used space already eaten up by "Other" on my new iPhone???... no music on the phone, no photos on the phone, less than 20 cloud based apps (Tweetbot, Instagram etc). I was instantly regretting getting the 16GB version of the 6 Plus.. so I called Apple to see if they could help me get rid of this extra "Other" data that was just sitting there. They specifically told me that iCloud Drive data is not stored on the iPhone and that I needed to restore the phone to get the storage space back. They also gave me this official list of items that cause "Other" space to balloon to this 5GB+ size..
What is "Other?" iTunes has 8 standard data categories listed in the Data Bar of iTunes. They are called Apps, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, Photos, and Info. Basically, anything stored on your iDevice that cannot fit into one of those 8 categories is categorized as "Other." This includes:
1 .Operating System
2.Mail cache
3.Mail messages
4.Mail attachments
5.Safari's Reading List
6.iTunes Backups
7.Orphaned files
8.Game data
9.Saved data files
10.Call history
11.Notes
12.Media
13.Voice memos
14.Browser cache
Basically, the longer apps run, the more resources they use, and the more information files are created from that.
Ways to shrink the "Other" space:
-Delete Browser Cache (History and Cookies)
-Delete and re-add Mail accounts (This will remove their saved e-mails from the device, though they will still exist on the servers.)
-Delete extra iTunes back-ups of the same device
-Delete old SMS conversations
-Reset All Settings
-Hard Reset while connected to iTunes
...Foolishly I did a clean restore and found 6.04GB of "Other" data waiting for me once I got back up and running again which ballooned to 9.60GB after adding a few more non iCloud apps. I was pissed and was planning on returning the 6 Plus to T-Mobile (paying the $50 restocking fee) and then wait for 3-4 weeks for the 64GB version.
Then I said let me try this.. I turn off iCloud Photo Stream.. got back 2GBs of space. Progress!! I turned of iCloud Drive 6GB freed.. More Progress!! then i squeezed out another 500mb on some other things in iCloud settings. Now my phone was ready for actual usage and I was relieved.
So the lesson here is keep as much off iCloud Drive folder on your OS X desktop and remember that you can't even use that stuff right now on your iPhone either way without some third party app to access the data. Finally Apple really should have made the entry level iPhone 6s have 32GB storage instead of 16GB.
What is "Other?" iTunes has 8 standard data categories listed in the Data Bar of iTunes. They are called Apps, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, Photos, and Info. Basically, anything stored on your iDevice that cannot fit into one of those 8 categories is categorized as "Other." This includes:
1 .Operating System
2.Mail cache
3.Mail messages
4.Mail attachments
5.Safari's Reading List
6.iTunes Backups
7.Orphaned files
8.Game data
9.Saved data files
10.Call history
11.Notes
12.Media
13.Voice memos
14.Browser cache
Basically, the longer apps run, the more resources they use, and the more information files are created from that.
Ways to shrink the "Other" space:
-Delete Browser Cache (History and Cookies)
-Delete and re-add Mail accounts (This will remove their saved e-mails from the device, though they will still exist on the servers.)
-Delete extra iTunes back-ups of the same device
-Delete old SMS conversations
-Reset All Settings
-Hard Reset while connected to iTunes
...Foolishly I did a clean restore and found 6.04GB of "Other" data waiting for me once I got back up and running again which ballooned to 9.60GB after adding a few more non iCloud apps. I was pissed and was planning on returning the 6 Plus to T-Mobile (paying the $50 restocking fee) and then wait for 3-4 weeks for the 64GB version.
Then I said let me try this.. I turn off iCloud Photo Stream.. got back 2GBs of space. Progress!! I turned of iCloud Drive 6GB freed.. More Progress!! then i squeezed out another 500mb on some other things in iCloud settings. Now my phone was ready for actual usage and I was relieved.
So the lesson here is keep as much off iCloud Drive folder on your OS X desktop and remember that you can't even use that stuff right now on your iPhone either way without some third party app to access the data. Finally Apple really should have made the entry level iPhone 6s have 32GB storage instead of 16GB.
