Get your iPhone other space back now!
Face it, we all have the problem, our iPhone/iPod touch storage space is never enough, no matter if you have an 8Gb or a 32Gb version. But… when those very much needed megabytes are being eaten by some monster called ‘Other‘, you start asking questions.
This ‘Other’ thing on your iPhone can take up only small amounts, such as several megabytes, but it can grow up to even a few gigabytes (my latest ‘other was 1.71Gb, but I’ve heard from people who’s ‘Other’ part took up no less then 6Gb!).
So time to get rid of this ‘Other’ thing!
But how? Apple doesn’t offer any solution for this. There is no way to delete ‘Other’ files, nor is there a way to find out what it is that is taking up this ‘Other’ space on your iPhone/iPod Touch.
Well, let me help you out!
Kill that iPhone other space!
First thing to try: check your ‘Trash’ folders of your email accounts on your iPhone. In some cases, the mails still in there can be the cause of your swollen ‘Other’ part. Emptying your ‘Trash’ folders by deleting these mails can be the solution, albeit a tedious one, as there is no way to delete multiple emails at once on the iPhone. If your on an IMAP account, use your mailprogram or a webinterface to delete the mails.
Second thing to try: delete your Safari cache. Go to settings/safari and clear history, cookies and cache. Doesn’t always work, but depending on how much you surf, it may help.
Third thing you can do works only if you have a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch: Use WinSCP or some other tool that you like that lets you browse your iPhone/iPod Touch’s files, and delete everyting in the iTunes_Control/Music folder, including all subfolders.
[ad]Fourth and last way of reclaiming the ‘Other’ space on your iPhone: Restore your iDevice… This is indeed a last resort to get your ‘Other’ space back, since it will take quite some time. To do this, connect your iDevice to your syncing iTunes, and let it take a backupcopy first (normally it does this automatically). Once this is done, click on your iPhone’s name in the left column in iTunes. You will see a page with a button saying ‘Restore’. Click this button, and follow the instructions iTunes gives you. After restoring your iDevice, iTunes will ask you if you want to treat this as a new device, or if you would like to put back the backup of your old device. Choose the latter (unless you want a newly installed iPhone of course, who am I to stop you 
). iTunes will put back the backup, and your iPhone is ready to use, with a whole lot of freed up ‘Other’ space!
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This is truely idiotic. For one, iTunes messes up the amount that fits into my iPhone (before sync it says my music takes, say, 5 GB, when I sync it suddenly says music takes 4.5 GB, then after sync it may say 4.5 or 5 GB). Now it has some “Other” space that is hogging gigs off it. It’s ridiculous.
Yes, I know it’s all in the name of “simplicity”, which in Apple terms means “never tell the user anything or let the user decide anything.” But it’s still idiotic. And I don’t want to restore my device all the time. But Apple doesn’t care since this has been a problem for a couple of years for some, it seems.
I think the space occupied by the “other” is a sure proof on how apple has messed up this part of the application. I love my Iphone but the space storage taken up by the “other” is ridiculous. I have had to make a restore every few months because of this. I will probably get my iphone jailbroken just to see if the third option works.
Thank you for the post. I must give this a try and hope my iPhone 3G gets a little faster.
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Very Helpful! Thank you so much! Step #1 took several megabytes off my 1.47 GB that were in “other”, but in the end I had to restore. Restoring wasn’t too bad, thankfully iTunes has everything on back up. I’m hearing a lot of people are having this problem tho. Frustrating! Esp, since my husband has the same phone and computer but dosn’t experience this mysterious “other’ lol!
Thanks again for your help!
Kawa
Restoring totally worked. Went from 2.4 gig other to .02.
I had 5,7 gb of other space taken on my iphone 4, but i startet to think how can i instal apps from instalious without being connected to internet, so i opend instalious, click download, an deleted all aplication from instalious, and it worked, now i have only few MB of other space taken, it seems that instalious keeps all downloaded apps in your iphone, by deleting them you´ll get your space back
I am up to 7.7GB of “Other”. Panzer, I need help and I am not up to your advanced knowledge of how you cleared out the “other”. Can you dumb this down or contact me directly?
Am I correct that your recommend an app called iFile?
I have done the clearing of cache, deleting email trash etc but I like your suggestions, i just dont follow along very well.
I have found the complete solution to this problem. It’s a bit of a long explanation that I’d rather not do, however after seeing so many peoples endless plight with this problem I thought I had “expose” the solution. Please note that each iPhone “Other” database clutter problem is case-specific, so what might work for you may not be the solution for somebody else. What I found was the following: iFile is the culprit. Apparently, iFile has an option embedded in it called “Trash”. When this option is turned ON, everything that is erased via iFile is put into a special “Trash” folder, hidden deep within the iPhone’s folder tree. I personally do a lot of video encoding and uploading to my iPhone, usually .MKV files well over 5+GB. Photos, .AVI’s, .MP4′s, .MPG’s, they all get routed to this Trash folder upon deletion. Fortunately, the culprit app also holds the solution. Before you go erasing anything, confirm that within iFile “Settings” (gear at bottom of screen) that Trash is turned OFF (it’s ON by default). Then, starting at the very beginning of the iPhone’s folder tree structure, hit the small blue button located next to each folder. There is about 15-20 of them in total. After pressing the blue circular button with arrow within it, you’ll be forwarded to the folder’s complete properties (similar to right-clicking on a folder icon in Windows). This will then tally up the folder’s complete contents size, including all sub-folders. I found two main folders that contained over 5GB’s of data in each. The ones that contain 1GB or less simply ignore as these are most likely system operating files or App functioning folders. Depending on the size of your “Other” database, you’ll know what size you need to be looking for. Do this for each folder and you will soon enough find precisely where this garbled junk of data is hiding. Then, simply erase the files within each folder. I did not erase the actual folders, simply because I did not want to compromise the root integrity of the iPhone’s filing structure. The whole process took about 10 minutes, and afterwards I went from having a whopping 9GB of “Other” data to a mere .94GB, almost instantly. I apologize for not being able to name the specific folder the junk files were in, but with a bit of persistence you’ll have no problems finding them. Most root folders on the iPhone contain either 0 Byes or less than 50MB, so you’ll have no problem locating the ones containing the bloat files. Using this method, in conjunction with erasing old data from the iTunes_Control folder, and finally erasing all Music, re-booting, then re-syncing music, you should completely eliminate all the unwanted data. As a side note, I found the folders containing Safari’s cache, history, and cookies. Several suggestions have been made to erase these items, however, the amount of space they consume, in total, is indeed negligible. This is definitely NOT a final solution for those of us with over 2GB’s of “Other” data within our iPhone. (I should also mention I purchased iFile, enabling many options that the free version lacks. It’s only $2 I believe, and it is the most versatile, simplest, and most effective file manipulation iPhone app out currently, hands-down. Awesome app!) Good luck everyone. (Phew!)
I had 9.5gb of other space and nothing has helped. I restored my phone and now have 9.1gb. Looks like I need to head to the iPhone store to see if they can help me? This is ridiculous!
[...] Restoring and Syncing your iTunes LibraryiTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone [solved]iPhone Other Space: Reclaim your iPhone storage space taken by ‘Other’. [...]
Panzer, u rock buddy!!! Awsome solution, the only thing u forgot to mention is after changing the trash settings in iFile, we have to empty the trash also to reclaim space.
God bless u!!
hi, can u pls tell me where is itunes control n how to delete it
Used third option. Had 5GB of other space. After deleting the folder in Itunes Control the issue was managed! Thanks for the article and the help! 5 Stars!
I had 11.9GB of data and I was able to clear all of it without doing a restore.
The basic idea is to search of the directory that contains lots of data that is not supposed to be there. To search for it I just use the command “du >space.xls” from the root of the space inside the iphone once I connect via SSH. I transferred the file, opened in Excel and ordered by column. The directory that did not have much meaning but had roughly 12Gb was in
/var/mobile/Library/Application Support/Containers/com.zodttd.vlc4iphone
It seems every time you watch a video on VLC it makes a copy in this directory, hence the increasing wasted space.
I erased this directory together with the above suggestion about iTunes_Control/Music folder and voila’ all Other is gone, not even 1MB, just gone
Hi Crep.
please tell me step by step i m using itunes on win7 pc. pls
The restore process was very easy and took a few minutes. My 11 GB of other is now gone.
Sorry but I still find part of step one wrong in saying that you can’t delete multiple emails at once even from trash….which after reading and re-reading and re-reading the wording it is confusing the way it is written imho. I only have IMAP only accounts to be able to test on so here it is on how to delete them quickly:
1. when viewing the list of emails click the edit button in the upper right hand corner
2. then select any emails you want to delete and press the red delete button not he bottom left (this will have a number next to it saying how many have been selected)
*there is also a function in the trash can that when you press edit that red button will automatically say delete all without having to select any
3. it will then ask you to confirm and voila they are gone at once.
So after playing around with disk aid and the data in the phone… I figured out that its the voice memos that is taking up space that doesnt show up in the app – Voice Memos. Even if you delete them from the app it somehow stays on thephone taking up the space. I deleted it manually from disk aid and it cut down 5.5 GB which is quite a lot…
Hope this helps..
Thank you so much! That iTunes_COntrol music folder took all the other away! Thanks!
ok so i keep trying to delete the trash out of my mail but it keeps comming back… what am i suppose to do now???
My ‘other’ is just over 9GB :/
Real solution install ifunbox to your pc and enter file system press search button and then search “*” then list results big to small sizes adn you can delate big file they are usually in other space
Yes you are right. I did same it worked for me as well
Yo–it was voice memos for me. I was able to fix it with iExplorer There were up to 15 copies of each voice memo in my “Recordings” folder on my iPhone, and I was able to delete them with this app.
Duplicate Voice Memos have been an issue since they introduced the Voice Memo app in iOS. Sheesh. Could somebody at Apple jump on that bad code, please?
Guys.. I’ve gone through this problem. I tried n number of options to resolve this. At last one worked out perfectly.
Main issue is when we copy movies they are cached in iphone 4 5 times. Though u delete them in iFile chache is still there.
This fix will for only on Jailbreaked iPhones or iPods. Ive tried it on my iPhone 4.
1. Install latest version of itunes
2. Download ifunbox www.i-funbox.com free tool to browse your idevice.
3. Connect your device to computer(Mine is PC) then open iFunbox.
4. on left side menu, select your device under mycomputer menu
5. And click on search on top
6. Then ‘match file name’ and ‘size larger than’ two text fields will be appeared down.
7. now type 30mb(or what ever) in size larger than field and hit search button which is above ‘match file name’. Leave it till the search is completed. This should take 5 to 10mins
8. now you will be able to find all movie files which are above 30mb. you will notice several movie files with same name stored in cache. Select all those shit, right click and delete.
9. Boom you save lot of space. Around 1gb space is taken for cydia and other plugins which are installed via cyida so don’t worry about 1gb otherspace.
This should work for iOS 4 and below. All the best
Thanks a ton sudheer the ifunbox trick worked perfectly for me I’ve 7 gig of mem free now on iPhone 4 4.3.5 jailbroken
This problem has been driving me crazy but managed to solve it in the end. Curiously it would seem that videos taken on your iPhone are classified as ‘other’. Back your videos up, take them off the iPhone and watch your ‘Other’ space shrink right down.
i have the same problem dude. but i already have a solution for that without restoring it. you gonna need to download iexplorer, here’s the link: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ after succesfully downloaded iexplorer, plugin your ipod and open iexplorer go to /var/mobile/media/iTunes_Control/Music , then delete all existing folders there. after that go to your ipod and delete all of your music then sync it to itunes. that will definitely works. your welcome
I had 2.9 GB of “other” on my iPhone 4, OS5… I cleaned the Safari cache, emptied my IMAP account’s trash folder, deleted some of my voice recordings and similar, nothing helped. Then I have installed iExplorer freeware (it’s absolutely great!)and cleaned up the iTunes_Control Music folder. I have ZERO of “other” space now. Yeaay!
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UREKA!
somebody mentioned it here – i tried it and it worked. went frm 4.4gb other to .85.
go into installous
go into downloads
press edit
delete all the downloaded apps
Brilliant! I had 1.05 GB of “Other”. After deleting the iTunes_Control using DiskAid, the entire “Other” storage disappeared! No more yellow bar… woohoo! Thank you!
Restoring it completely worked for me! Went from 2.6GB to .30GB! Thank you!
[...] 一度工場出荷状態に戻すことによってだいたいなんでも解決してしまうことは多いが、64GBモデルで音楽や動画を詰め込んでいる人は復元してデータを戻すのに半日は掛かってもおかしくない。 困っていなければそのままでも問題ないと思うが（現に僕もまだ「その他」の容量に2GB取られているわけだし）、どうしても気になる人は復元する前にできることをやってみることをおすすめする！！ （via OS X Daily） （via iCan’t Internet） [...]