How do I reclaim iPhone storage space taken up by 'Other'?
We've been getting numerous reports of users, who have attempted to sync their iPhones after the latest iTunes updates (7.4.x), finding that iTunes shows space on their iPhone occupied by something specified only as 'Other'. Often, this space may be only small amounts (a few megabytes), but we have received reports of 'Other' taking up as much as 4 gigabytes.
Unfortunately, scouring available information sources and speaking with Apple hasn't led to any type of easy resolution.
If you're experiencing this issue under any version of iTunes, you'll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other. That is the only known solution at this time.
If you've found another solution to the 'Other' issue, please let us know.
Presumably this issue will be rectified by the next iTunes update.
UPDATE: User Andrew S. said he deleted "a substantial number of text threads containing pictures and videos" to clean out half of the "Other" storage on his phone. Andrew claims he went from having zero free space to 1.88GB by using this technique.
OK. I’ve been hunting all weekend because my OTHER category grew to over 11Gb on my 32Gb iphone 4S (not jail broken). I ried several of the solutions here including restoring from backup but none helped my problem.
Many people seem to be having the same issue (i.e. a huge OTHER category) all caused by a similar problem (i.e. tons of duplicate files) but for different reasons (i.e. music, photo’s, video, 3rd party apps etc…). IOS seems to be creating and or holding onto these duplicate files for some reason(s), some explainable (i.e. a 3rd party app is retaining a downloaded file and not deleting it) and some unexplainable (see my issue below).
My issue started with repeated iCloud backup error messages stating that iOS couldn’t back up up to iCloud because there wasn’t enough storage and I needed to buy more. After a closer look on my iphone it states that my next iPhone iCloud back is 10.4Gb. Combine that with my wife iphone, my daughters ipod, and our family ipad and I’m over my 15Gb plan by about 2Gb’s. However when I look at my phone and what I’m backing up (I shut off most all apps) I should be way under 15Gb. Looking closer at my iphone on iTune I notice OTHER has grown to over 11Gb’s!!!
Here’s what worked for me.
1) Connected my iphone via USB to my PC. OTHER = 11.2Gb
2) Use DiskAid to copy voice memo’s to my PC listed under \\File System\Media\Recordings.
3) Use DiskAid to delete all “voice memo’s” and other files listed under \\File System\Media\Recordings.
4) Disconnected my iphone and reboot it.
5) Reconnect via USB to PC and open iTunes and voila! OTHER = 1.12Gb.
NOTE: Deleting files directly off iPhone via DiskAid is done at your own risk. Bad things can happen if you make a mistake.
My other file is still big but much better than 11+Gb. I recorded a new voice memo, downloaded some app updates, resync’d my iphone and its all seems to be working fine and other = 1.12Gb. Looks like OTHER is holding steady but I’m guessing tomorrow night I will have to clean up my wife’s iphone, my daughter’s ipod and the family ipad.
Root Cause of 11Gb OTHER: My 11 year old daughter had created hundreds of silly voice recordings over the past several years across various devices. Unbeknownst to me, our ithings were saving these voice memo’s in apple lossless format (which makes huge files). Also, for some reason, each device changed the artist name (i.e. the artist was originally named for the device the voice memo was originally recorded on (i.e. “Dad’s iPhone”, “Daughter’s iPod”, etc…) but each time a voice memo would get sync’d to another device that device would make a copy of the memo and change the artist name to that device’s name. The next ime it sync’d it would copy both files which resulted in many mulitples of copies (because we have 4 devices) on my iphone for the exact same voice memo recording. Looking at the voice memo’s on my iphone it only listed ~145 voice memo’s however DiskAid found several thousand files (just under 10,000 files) in this directory (\\File System\Media\Recordings)that totaled ~10Gb of data.
To this wonderful person who posted this help!! OMG!! i wanna give you a hug!!! I got y head in with these dumb apple techincal support call center.. kept on saying my warranty was expired and not addressing my 10GB of OTHERS. So i downloaded DISKAID online, changed the preferences and into the files system and got rid of the little empy folders.... Media/iTunes_Control/Music
and having said that i had duplicte recordings in the recording folder.... there you go!! 1gb left!!
Apple support Regarding this issue can go suck butts! other than that.. theyre alright!
THANK YOU AGAIN Random guy/girl!!!
Thank you for this! Your enthusiasm encouraged me to try DISKAID out and I found 27 GIGS (!) of music in the Media/iTunes_Control/Music. I had updated my operating system and suddenly I had - 27 GB of space on my iPod. I love the internet....
my songs do not play, even after syncing. deleting the files from iTunes_control/music. it did however delete other!
I FUCKING LOVE YOU BRO..IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM!!! I HAVE MY SPACE BACK!! I LOVE U!! <3 < 3
i did this and now my music wont play
YES! Thank you so much I freed 7.3gb by just deleting stuff in the mdt section!! Thank you!
I can not figure out how to do this, would you mind a little bit more broken down for the instructions? Do I do this through my phone? Thanks
ANOTHER THING TO CONSIDER
if you go thru your text messages and delete images and videos that have been sent over time then you can clear out a lot of that space too. I went thru all messages today, and notice I had text videos and photos to people (mostly family), so I deleted them and VOILA! 5.3 gb of Other was now .79 gb.
I feel so much better and hopefully my iphone will run better. ..
And if you're not using Safari?
That worked so well! so simple i would never have even thought that was the cause. i had 6.5 gb of other then cleared my safari history and such now only have .70 gb of other! thanks!:)
HotsieDAM !!! Worked like a charm _ After 4 frustrating weeks and lots of throwing out pics and apps this method did it . THANKS to the crowd on the web - !! No-one of us knows more than all of us!! THANKS AGAIN
I have 3 GB of other on my iPod touch. I tried this and restarted it but it didn't make a difference. I use Safari often, too! My iPod's really stunk lately!! No matter how much stuff I delete, it says my memory's full and I can't take pictures and such. I don't want to have to restore it, but I just need help! Thanks!
Thanks: it worked!
awesome! thanks!!
Wow! That zapped it from 7.8G of 'other' down to about 2.3G - doesn't get rid of it all, but thanks for such a simple solution.At least I should now be able to sync
i did and it did nothing any other solutions???
want to take all of itune off iphone do not liston to music on iphone
im my case: i had installed BIGU and download a dozen of movie showing in download lite apps.
So log in BIG U and go in my file folder and remove as many movies you feel to and you will free a lot of room.
let me know if works....
I used DiskAid to access the iPhone and found out that in the Recordings folder i had about 1GB of voice memo duplicates. Some of them had 19 duplicates of the same recording. I saved them to my desktop and then i had deleted them all. The Other tab shrunk back to 0,58GB.
the other section of my iphone storage is 3.1 gb and the solutions i found here was with the use of diskaid, where can i get that?
OTHER is 90% text messages saved on your phone (so just delete them and you'll see most of this "other" vanish).
The other 8% of OTHER is your saved cookies so clear all that.
The last 2% of OTHER is normal so don't worry about that.
Could it be your internet cache/cookie/history?? Perhaps too many internet pictures? lol
The OTHER took up almost all my memories...6+ Gigabytes...I had to RESTORE and re-synced all over again. And I'm running on Itunes 7.3.2.6
Yes at least it was for me! I just went into the iPhones settings and then saffari and erased cache, cookie and history and got it all back, about 20 GB. ;D
I did that too and I got all my space back, thanks for the alternative to cleaning everything out!
well honestly i had other on my old ipod nano and it was for album artwork on there cuz it went up and down depending on how many songs i had that had album artwork
but i was watching mine just now as i'm syncing more songs to my iphone and it seems to be going down and then randomly going back to 118.45 MBs it's confusing i do hope apple fixes that
My iPhone lost its Name id on iTunes and all my media (music and Podcasts) 4GB disapeared. A new amount of other now replaces the content at ~4GB. I have now reset the name in iTunes and re-synched. The iPhone is now full with a combination of my replaced media content and the 'other' locked space.
I have had a previous iPhone that had 1 Gb of space claimed by "Other" in that case, the only way to recover was a complete restore. But that’s a painful process as it requires lots of time to set all my mail, connectivity etc again.
There must be a way or utility to recover the 'other' place.
Any help appreciated.
Well, I also got 5 GB of 'Other' after I decided to erase my library and synchronise the iphone with the Itunes in another computer.
What I did was to jailbrake the iphone (google how to do it for your firmware version), install OpenSSH (through Cydia) and see what these files were. Based on the size of the files and the date of creation (iTunes scrambles the filenames) they appeared to be the same files I had before i 'erased' them. So I deleted them manually all the music and video files that were 'created' in a given date I knew I synchronised my iphone for the last time with the previous computer.
I recovered most of the space. Although i didn't dare deleting the files I wasn't sure about.
I'm having the same problem. All of my music and videos were reclassified as Other. This means that I can't list, play, or delete any of the files in iTunes, or on my iPhone itself. The storage space is basically useless. Is the only solution to reset the whole device? Obviously that's a worst case scenario.
This is pretty disappointing.
The same thing happened to me, on my iPod touch.
I have 4.75 gb of other and all my music and video is gone.
I really don't want to reset it because my computer crashed and all my itunes music is gone, and the pictures I have on my ipod are too.
Thi is awful, I'm tired of having problems with this thing.
I just had the same problem. 5.08 gb of "Other", but no music, videos or photos. I ran the "Restore" but was prompted to backup the iphone before I proceeded. I did so, and it took some time but as far as I can see all my contacts, etc. (even saved notes) are back just as they were before the restore. Not that big of a deal really, although terribly inconvenient!
How do you retrieve from a backup? I am having the same problem, photos-apps-music takes up very little space but then my other disc space has almost maxed out my entire memory. I am not real iphone/computer savy and fear losing my contacts and my personal settings i have on my phone. How do i backup and how do i retrieve from backup to be up and running again? Thanks!
I have a 4 GB second generation Nano and the same thing is happening to me: Other is going up. I don't see any contacts or calendar information on the Nano, so that's not it. This seems to be a recent development. I'm running iTunes 10.2.1.1 on Windows 7.
i think it was from interrupting syncs and backups that my iphone had 5gb of other (corrupt disk space as far as i can tell). a restore did solve this and i was left with only 500mb of other. about a day later though i deleted a movie file with mobilefinder (2.7gb) and was immediately saddled with 2.7gb of other. i experimented with iphone browser (don't know about any other app or ssh) and it does relinquish the space from deleted files but that doesn't help me with the 2.7gb i created with mobile finder. not sure about using terminal's rm command but i'll try it and hopefully remember to post back here. at any rate i'm in for another restore me thinks.
so for now just use iphone browser to delete files, this should hopefully avoid more "other". i hope this helps the collective. and pleeeeeeaaaase sombody find a way to recover the space without doing a restore. i wish i could code i'd give it a go.
*edit*
it was the mobile finder from cydia, not the app store
*UPDATE*
So I tested it with 700mb movie files and mobile finder is definitly not reallocating the space. Mobileterminal rm command does reallocate the space for reuse, I confirmed that as well. So that is a much safer option. Now I have to restore... again... cause my "Other" is now over 7gb. Weeeeeeak.
P.s. I already sent an email of a bug report to the current developer of mobilefinder.
*update*
So I have been informed that mobilefinder uses a trash folder and boy do I feel stupid. But hey maybe it will save some people some time. After emptying the trash folder in ~/Library/MobileFinder/ I got all that space back. But my other is still 2.7 gigs from before. Go figure.
So, i have been unable to update my iphone 4 since i bought it. It is glitching and i know i need the update BUT of course the "OTHER" is in the way.
How do i find "~/Library/MobileFinder/ "
is that on the phone or itunes. PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP
100% Agree
i found that when deleting files my other goes up and i know why if u have a jailbroken ps3, get ifile then navigate to /var/mobile/library/ifile/trash
here is where all delted files are kept! hope this helps!
OMG! Thanks!! that totally works!
I've encountered the same problem. as i deleted a video directly from iPhones storage, under the USAGE, and at the same time i unchecked the same video in the iTunes library and clicked on apply and sync. That immediately increased the OTHER file storage to 2.7GB. I then powered off the phone and powered back on, the OTHER files size decreased from 2.7 GB to 600 MB. i'm still troubleshooting and trying to remove the rest. the OTHER storage surely contains all sorts of things, such as browser's temp files cache, etc. but larger files such as i had, it had to be an error reading of the syncing. the more features Apple adds to iTunes and iPhone for syncing convenience the more glitches open up to the users. i will have to research a more extensive information about that damn OTHER stuff, that even Apple supporters don't know about it. i also suspect that Apple might have a secret proprietary surveillance on our devices. this particular location ,marked as OTHER, perhaps is the same feature that Apple wants consumers subscribe to those ERROR problems report to Apple electronically. Probably that's why their tech support doesn't know anything about it, because Apple did not reveal to tech guys.
UNBELIEVABLE. The first time my iPad had 13.5GB of 'Other' I did a restore and it got rid of it. But this time I had 6.5GB and I found your post. I already suspected that when I was deleting Video on the device that it went from 'Video' space to 'Other' space. Anyway, after you post I did something I never do and it worked.
I POWERED OFF THE iPad AND TURNED IT BACK ON.
When it came back on it Synced with iTunes (because it was plugged in) and my other went from 6.5GB to 0.85GB which I can handle.
Thanks!
I hope other people find your post helpful. It is buried a bit in the chain.
Wait, I should note, the only other thing I had done was clear Safari History and Cookies and Data. That didn't take effect right away but it may have taken affect when I power off and on after that.
But I'm still pretty sure it's deleting Video files using the Video App that is the problem.
Godspeed.
hi guys,
just,i found the easy solution for this problem.
just go to the directory where u installed ur Itunes and reg again the following 2 dll files.(double Click the files)
G:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources
iTunesRegistry.dll
iTunes.dll
start ur itune and you will see the light.
How do you register these dll's again?
Can you explain in more detail please? I don't follow.
how do u do that can u give me more in detail?
Doube clicking in the files you mentioned didn't work for me. Still having the "Other" issue... I live outside the USA and Apple's customer service is practically non existent here, since they only take calls from USA or Canada... If someone has another solution please help!
register the dll's with the following command from a command prompt.
regsrv32 {itunes_name}.dll then you'll get a message stating that it has been registered with windows.