System Data Overflow Bug - storage full with 170GB of undeletable data!

[harkon]

Hmm. Last week something strange happened. I always had this problem. On my 512GB iP17PM I had about 20GB of system data after restoring the phone from my iCloud backup. System data startet to grow and reached up to about 50 GB. I have a lot of apps installed an a rather large offline music library. After the update to 26.2 the system data went back to about 20GB and startet to grow again. I was sure that I had to live with this problem. But: all of a sudden from one day to another about a week ago I checked system data after waking up and was surprised to see that it decreased to about 11GB!!! Since then it is stable between 11 and 13 GB. I really don’t know what changed. A lot of app updates of course. But I cant really make a connection between a specific app update and the decrease in system data. I didn’t change anything else. The same offline music. Same amount of photos. Same apps. It stays on the low level even after hard reset.

 

[harkon]

Hot-diggity-dog! I was able to get the storage logs, and ran a script just to analyze the private_var-dev_disk1s2.fslisting file. It revealed that, yes, I also have an enormous directory: /private/var/containers/Shared/SystemGroup/systemgroup.com.apple.lsd.iconscache . It's 50.2 GB. Deeper inside that directory are 161,000+ files inside, just a few MB each, with names like this: F5C1530A-055E-3CA0-AA9B-E0C05AED3709.isdata.

And that's not all – I found an old diagnostic I ran from November, ran the script and found that it, also, had an out-of-control icon cache.

So – it looks like there's some kind of dumb crap going on with this icon cache. I tint my icons red when in Sleep mode. I might try turning this off, for now.

But – I think we're on to something with this icon cache. Any ideas on what we can do with this?

This is what I always thought. My system data always increased after I experienced the icon redraw bug. It felt like the icons were somehow cached but always added on top of the old cache. All of a sudden the problem disappeared for me. I can’t figure out why.

 

[gooutside]

An update: as expected, my phone did it again! It's been less than a month and, sure enough, the System Data has plugged up every single bit of available space – like a pathological, mindless moron – and a review of the iOS Storage Logs shows that, once again, it's related to /private/var/containers/Shared/SystemGroup/systemgroup.com.apple.lsd.iconscache.

I tried to stem this behavior by preventing icon tinting but – that didn't do anything, apparently.

Once again, I'm going to have to wipe and re-install everything on my phone, and – once again – I will file another bug report about this repeated issue with Apple – an issue that is entirely and completely outside my control to resolve.