All Devices “Other” category takes up over 10 GB storage

[Tapiture]

So I’m sure other people have experienced this, but on both my iPhone and my iPad the “other” category takes up an insane amount of storage. It seems like every 3 months I have to go through the motions of wiping my device to get rid of this huge buildup of cached system files.

To be honest, I’m starting to suspect Apple does this on purpose to try to get people to upgrade their old devices to new ones with higher base storage. I don’t ever remember this happening in iOS 11 and earlier.

Any tricks to get rid of this chunk other than wiping the device?

 

[Maclver]

How did you see the size of the “other” section?

 

[Shirasaki]

How did you see the size of the “other” section?

With iOS 13, there is a magic gesture called scroll down.
With iOS 12 and earlier, there is a now-deprecated legacy app called “iTunes” That can check this info.

 

[IowaLynn]

It’s system cache, logs, and designed to improve responsiveness.

 

[Maclver]

With iOS 13, there is a magic gesture called scroll down.
With iOS 12 and earlier, there is a now-deprecated legacy app called “iTunes” That can check this info.

No need to be a smart a$$

 

[Blue Hawk]

It’s system cache, logs, and designed to improve responsiveness.

How to get the space back?

 

[gwhizkids]

So I’m sure other people have experienced this, but on both my iPhone and my iPad the “other” category takes up an insane amount of storage. It seems like every 3 months I have to go through the motions of wiping my device to get rid of this huge buildup of cached system files.

To be honest, I’m starting to suspect Apple does this on purpose to try to get people to upgrade their old devices to new ones with higher base storage. I don’t ever remember this happening in iOS 11 and earlier.

Any tricks to get rid of this chunk other than wiping the device?

It is well known that during the use of betas Apple enables extensive logging. If you don't like the accumulation of these, sync your phone via the Mac (iTunes or the new Finder based syncing in Catalina). Poof. Gone. For now.

I don't understand why people ascribe evil motives to Apple on this. Its normal behavior and well documented.

 

[Tapiture]

It is well known that during the use of betas Apple enables extensive logging. If you don't like the accumulation of these, sync your phone via the Mac (iTunes or the new Finder based syncing in Catalina). Poof. Gone. For now.

I don't understand why people ascribe evil motives to Apple on this. Its normal behavior and well documented.

For me it’s been happening even once the betas are over and I switch back to the non-beta software. I’ll try syncing it, though.

 

[Broken Hope]

It is well known that during the use of betas Apple enables extensive logging. If you don't like the accumulation of these, sync your phone via the Mac (iTunes or the new Finder based syncing in Catalina). Poof. Gone. For now.

I don't understand why people ascribe evil motives to Apple on this. Its normal behavior and well documented.

I went from 12.4 to 13 beta 6 and immediately lost 15GB of space to 'other' so I don't think it's just logs and such considering it happened immediately.

 

[IowaLynn]

Wonder if it's like Windows.old alina with beta iOS installer, or wasn't iOS 12 reporting "System" as ~20GB? was definitely not 6GB for system.

VM pages mapped for every app too is a possibility.

 

[Shirasaki]

I don't understand why people ascribe evil motives to Apple on this. Its normal behavior and well documented.

Probably because Apple is way more closed sourced on its iOS than macOS, making digging many stuff suspicious extremely difficult if not outright impossible.

 

[DGGoingUphill]

My XS Max was up to 36GB last night. Back to under 10 now.

 

[big samm]

About 10gb on my Xs Max and im not using beta 13...
That’s why i always setup my devices as new so i don’t transfer all the garbage back on the device

 

[gwhizkids]

What’s odd for me, in examining my storage use after reading this thread, is that I have 4 GB being used by Notes. I have about 200 notes, most just text and a few with screenshots and the like. Since you can’t determine the size of a particular note (right?), I can’t figure out which one(s) is the offender.

My concern is that many of my recent notes are generated with Apple Pencil in my fairly new iPad Pro. I am hoping that those notes are not significantly larger than plain text typed notes because of their nature as images.

Edit: The 4 GB is on my phone. On my iPad, the Notes app is using 297 mb! Clearly something going on here!

 

[itsmilo]

Mine went down from 10 GB to 5 GB after a sync on my Mac. I wonder if the analytic data is corrupt cuz clicking on that in the settings also crashes my settings app