Currently trying to clear up space on my iPhone storage - I’ve deleted all large attachments but it still shows that it’s taking up 12.75GB. When I click Messages it says it’s photos within my messages that are taking up space. But I’ve deleted it all? Anyone have any advice? I’m at wits end with this storage stuff - and I pay $9.99 for iCloud too!

So I own a 128Gb iPhone 12 mini. Have experienced the same issue with my prev iPhone as well. My storage got full almost three days back. Now I deleted an app taking around 1.5 gb of space and then it got emptied as expected. But after sometime what do I see, the storage is full again with me not doing anything. Next I uninstall another app, storage empties and then it is full again… What the….

Now I delete some pictures and clear my bin too almost 2 gb.. After some time the storage is full again.. Don’t know why and what is happening, does this happen with you guys too ?

And also , how do you deal with the issue once your storage is full…

I have an iPhone 11 and an iPad and they're constantly reporting storage full, no matter how many photos & apps I delete or offload. This is a constant problem.

I'll go through with a cleaner program and I'll delete about 4GB of photos and videos, and even the storage indicator will show that I have tons of room left. Then, an hour later, I’ll still get “storage full” messages.

This happens on both my iPhone and iPad.

I have iCloud storage and also pay extra for added storage; it's nowhere near full on my iCloud account.

Is this a bug? Known issue?

I am on an iPhone 14 Pro Max 256gb iOS 26.0 (23A5326a) and my phone storage is completely full. System data uses overwhelming the majority of my storage. I have already tried the double date change trick and it took 20gb and an hour later everything back and a bit more.

So I got a 1TB iphone 13 pro and as I was looking for useless stuff to fill it will Apple helped me with a hefty 28 GB of system data 3 weeks after my purchase. Here is a solution ive found for getting rid of most of it

1. Delete the Apple TV app from the home screen (you can also delete it from the iPhone Storage

2. Then quickly go to Settings>General>iPhone Storage

3)Either Instagram Or Tiktok will immediately shoot up to tens of gigabytes (in my case Tiktok was 4GB and instagram was 17GB, with system data being 28GB before deleting the TV app) of data and when you click them you will see that nearly all of it is Documents and Data. You have to do this quickly as in a matter of seconds they will go back to 300-400 mb and all of the excess data will return to System Data tab

4) Delete them (as there is no way to delete the cache in some apps) and wait a minute or two , system data should revert to 8-9gb

5) Reinstall them and turn off the background refresh for the app

Of course this could be any other app like Netflix or Disney+ which will accumulate cache as you stream content even if you don’t have any offline content downloaded.

Strangely enough My iPad air 256 which never had Instagram or Tiktok installed has 8 gigs of system data since the day I got it

Please let me know in the comments if this worked for you.

Has your phone run out of space, and you did your due diligence to clear it out? Was that space then turned into “system data?” How do you get rid of system data?

Well, from what I read on different blogs and Apple support articles, all you can really do is offload unused apps, get rid of messages, clear out caches in different apps, etc. but that’s not really getting rid of system data…and I’ve noticed my phone seemingly getting sluggish over the last few weeks after offloading a ton of movies from traveling recently. It basically turned that data into system data. So here’s the trick…

If you have an iPhone capable of shooting ProRes video, go into your camera, go into video mode, and enable ProRes. You’ll notice a ticker at the top that tells you the maximum amount of time you can shoot in this mode. It will more than likely be 0 minutes, but you will see right below that a spinning ticker saying “optimizing resources.” This is getting rid of that system data that’s unneeded. I just left my phone in this mode for a few minutes and it freed up five minutes worth of video, but then gave me the option to continue free resources. It essentially got rid of the rest of the system data that wasn’t needed and left me with the free space above!

Hope this helps!

I never have enough storage to update or to download new apps because my storage always seems to be full and I can’t remove any of these apps cause I need them all and why is my photos out taking out almost a gigabyte? I have often my storage on.

Hi all, attached supporting photos. My phone keeps saying it is running out of storage (and clearly it is), but my photos are taking up 10GB’s when I have them backing up to the iCloud.

So here’s my issue- correct me if I’m wrong, but even with the photos backed up onto the iCloud, if I delete photos from my phone, I get a prompt saying that photo will be “deleted across all devices including iCloud”. So, how in the heck am I supposed to free up space on the phone?

Also, before it is recommended- since the photos are backed up to iCloud, I cannot transfer them to my computer/external hard drive. I tried but the folders were just empty. :/

Any help is appreciated because other than this my phone still works just fine.

Everytime I manage to clear storage from my apps IOS just takes up more storage.

Does anyone have an idea why the iOS all of a sudden (literally got a notice this morning) is taking up over 140 GB of space on my phone?

My system data takes up 36.59 GBs.

I know that’s not excessive for an operating system in general, and yes, I know 128 gigs isn’t very much these days, but it still seems crazy to me that the system data is almost 1/3 of a devices storage.

I know they appear to be slowly moving iOS, iPad, OS, and macOS towards some unified multi device operating system (which would be amazing), so there is probably some foundations for that bloating the system that aren’t getting used right now…

But even with that, it just feels kind of nuts for a phone’s operating system to take up such a huge portion of the phones memory.

———

P.s., no Settings doesn’t actually show you how many gigabytes your system data is taking up. I gave a screenshot to ChatGPT that was cropped to the width of the line chart, and I had it right Python code that would use the number of pixels in the system data section divided by the total width of the chart to approximate the gigabytes taken up by system data. Prompt in the comments.

My phone keeps giving me the notification that my phone storage is full. But I’ve offloaded or deleted all but maybe 4 apps in my phone. Deleted some photos and videos, text and large attachments. Every suggestion. But more than half my storage isnt even being used by me. What do I do here? It’s an iPhone XR

I had a huge iCloud storage shown on my iPhone last couple of months. Even though my iCloud drive is around 3-5mb, it was shown on my iphone storage as 170-180Gb for a moment. Today I realized that things are going more interesting. I saw several similar topics but it is first time that I see something like this. Anyone know the solution? I don’t want to reset hence there are many banking apps needs to be re-activated which I am trying to avoid.

even if i delete every photo and every single app on my phone, they add up to practically less than 2.5GB

everything else is eaten up by "other" storage.

how do i clear "other" storage?

Well, it's time to deep search this forum, the internet and AI to solve my storage problem. Apple has completely lost the plot on storage requirements and the size of IOS.

I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max with 128 GB that's worked great until the last 6 months which have brought a host of "your storage is full" messages.

IOS needs 62GB for System data? Why?

Who is the product manager that decided it was an OK option to "offline unused apps" to solve space problems. Some apps aren't just used very much. That's all. I don't want to have to wait for a parking app to redownload to use it. It's on my phone.

Here was my fun this morning:

1. Get the "storage full" message when I had about 1.5GB free last night.

2. Go look and see that my phone is 127.61GB used

3. I go into Photos (taking up 6.9GB) and delete a bunch of videos and photos. Some of the videos were lengthy and, all told, deleted about 1GB of stuff.

4. Permanently delete those items

5. Check storage: 127.72GB - WTF did it go UP??

Apple's suggesetion: "You can save 11GB of space by offloading unused apps!"

Here's my suggestion Apple: Get better engineers. Reduce the size of your own apps.

I'm open to suggestions. I've already rebooted, deleted, offlined.....

It's a mess.

Bloated mess. SMH.

A 0.1 update that needs 14 GB which can’t be downloaded because the system data eats 28 GB. There’s enough space to download the update if the OS has a better storage management system instead of keeping junk forever.

An OS in 2026 that doesn’t have controls to clear cache or do it automatically is pathetic.

Insanely large app sizes with bloated document sizes are another headache. Also why does system data fill up all my free space ffs?!

So much for it just works.

Hi guys!

My IPhone 8 says the storage is full even though I keep deleting apps and pictures. This has been going on for 2 weeks.

When I connect it to iTunes, it shows that I have 8GB available. When I try to save the phone on iTunes, it’s says the storage is too full to sync, though.

I keep deleting pictures and nothing changes. I emptied the deleted pictures section. I deleted my browser history.

It says I have around 18Gb of system data and every time I delete something the number just gets bigger instead of the available storage.

I still have ICloud storage available. I’ve turned on/off the phone a few times, doesn’t change anything.

Do you have any idea what i could do ? I can’t even open WhatsApp so it’s been really hard :( thanks !

I’m under iOS 16.3.1 btw.