How To Clear Your Phone Storage



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How to clear your phone storage devices

I'm sure this sounds familiar: You're trying to download and install the latest iOS release, or take some photos, or download that cool app your friend told you about, and your iPhone says the storage is full.

How To Clear Your Phone Storage
  1. Just tap Uninstall. IPhone: It’s easy to delete apps on your iPhone or iPad. Start by long-pressing the background on your screen. This will result in all apps appearing to shake.
  2. In Settings General iPhone Storage, tap on an app at the top of the list. This will often be a social media app like Facebook or Snapchat, a messenger, or a content app like YouTube or Spotify.

What happens when you clear the cache on your phone? Clearing the cache removes temporary files that are used to load things faster. However, on the bright side, it clears up the storage as well.

You've already deleted every app you don't think you need, and there's still not enough space. So you look at your iPhone storage in Settings and, sure enough, your iPhone is full. Worst of all, a huge chunk of it is just listed as Other. What's that supposed to mean? How do you get rid of it?

The Other storage section is mysterious and confusing, and there's no one answer that works for everyone, but hopefully this guide will help you deal with this problem.

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How to view your iPhone storage

Phone

To see how much storage all your apps and data are taking up on your iPhone's storage, open the Settings app, select General, then iPhone Storage. Up top you'll see a bar graph showing your total iPhone storage and which types of data are filling it up. Beneath that you'll find a list of applications on your phone and how much room they take up, both for the app itself and its stored data.

You'll find your iPhone storage details a few layers deep in the Settings app.

It may take several seconds for your iPhone to show the graph, as it takes time to scan and analyze its storage. Even after the chart first appears, you'll want to wait several seconds more for it to stabilize, as the app list and storage sizes can change while your phone completes its analysis.

What is Other storage, anyway?

Your iPhone Storage menu will divide that bar up top into familiar categories like Apps, Media, Photos, and Mail, but also an Other category that is sometimes very large. It's common for Other to be in the 5-10GB range, but if it's way over 10GB, it has probably grown out of control. You can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the app list to see how much space System and Other are taking up.

The Other category is big and varied, because it's a real catch-all category. It's comprised of system files, caches, Siri voices (if you've downloaded other voices), logs, updates, and so much more. One of the biggest culprits for Other growing out of hand is streaming lots of music and video. When you download video or music from the iTunes store, TV app, or Music app, it's indexed as Media. But streams have caches used to ensure smooth playback, and those are categorized as Other.

Safari's caches can start to grow pretty large, too. And if you send tons of texts with images or video, the caches for that can start to fill up a lot of space.

Your iPhone is supposed to manage these caches to keep your storage from becoming completely full, but it doesn't always do a great job.

How to reduce the size of Other data

You can't get rid of Other entirely, but you can sometimes reduce its size.

First, let's try clearing your Safari caches. Open Settings > Safari and choose Clear History and Website Data. If you have a lot of Safari tabs open on your iPhone, you might want to close most of them, too.

Clearing your Safari data might reduce the size of Other.

How To Clear Your Phone Storage Devices

You might also want to change Messages to save fewer old messages. Open Settings, then Messages, and scroll down to the Message History setting. By default, Keep Messages is set to Forever, but you may want to change it to 1 Year or even 30 Days to reduce the data that the Messages app caches.

If you're a heavy texter, your Messages app might be filling up your storage with a lot of data.

Finally, go back to iPhone Storage and look at the apps list. Most of the apps store data that is categorized as Apps, but some will keep caches that are categorized as Other. If, say, the Podcasts app is taking up a couple gigabytes of space, it's likely mostly cached data. Deleting the app and re-downloding it might put a dent in the Other category.

The nuclear option: Backup and Reset with iTunes

You can go through your iPhone trying to delete every little cache that could grow the size of Other storage, but if you really want to make it as small as possible, you need to back up your phone and reset it. This can take a little while.

The best way to do this is to use iTunes on your Mac or PC.

Connect your iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes. You may be prompted to allow access on your iPhone and required to enter your passcode, which you should do.

Select your iPhone by clicking the little phone icon in the upper left, and under Backups, choose This Computer. Checking Encrypt local backup is a good idea, so your account passwords and Health data gets backed up, too. Just choose a password you won't forget. Click the button to Back up now.

Create an encrypted backup to make the restore process as painless as possible.

When the backup is done, disconnect your iPhone and head to Settings > General > Reset and choose Erase All Content and Settings. This will return your iPhone to an out-of-the-box state. When it restarts and it's in the initial setup process, re-connect it to your computer with iTunes open, and follow the instructions on screen to restore your device.

This is the longest and most involved way to reduce the size of Other storage, but it's also the best; there's just no way to get it any smaller than it will be after a fresh reset and restore.

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For most iPhone users, the biggest struggle every day is to clear current space for additional data. Especially if you still have the old models of the iPhone, it will be hard for you to clear more space. The chances are, you will have to dump many old memories to create new ones.

Although the ultimate solution is to buy an iPhone with more storage such as 64GB or 128 GB, however, it is hard for people to sell their old phones and put a cut on the beautiful memories from the past. So if you know someone who has been struggling with this issue and continues to face them, make them read this article. Here, we will talk about creating more space in the iPhone, deleting old stuff, and a lot more. So make sure to sift through the blog till the end diligently.

1. Delete the Apps That You Don’t Need

All of us are caught up with installing applications that we probably wouldn’t ever require in our entire lives. In fact, most people fall for the marketing trap that is focused on compelling people to install a few applications because of their benefits to the user. Therefore, the first thing to do should be to delete all the applications, which are not required. For this to happen, you need to sift through your phone, open the applications manager, select all of them and click on “Delete”.

As soon as you get rid of such applications, your phone will eventually show more space that’s available.

Storage

2. Prefer Music Streaming Over iTunes

How To Clear Your Storage On Your Phone

As much as it sounds compelling, iTunes can take up a lot of space in your iPhone. Especially if you’re a big music fan, your phone is going to have a very tough time adjusting for additional data. This should be on the top of your priority list especially if you have a 16GB phone. Although streaming doesn’t work with places without a decent 4G connection, still you can have fun with the music that’s available in bulk. Having a lot of music through iTunes will consume more space than you can imagine. This in turn will leave no space for the photos and videos.

3. Set Your Message App to “Delete Messages After 30 Days”

How To Clear Your Storage

Although it sounds weird your phone messages consume a lot of space as well even if you do check them very often. With modern applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, people are not inclined towards using the conventional message app. You’ll be shocked to know, how much storage space the messages can take up. However, with a simple iPhone setting, you can change the dynamics of everything. As soon as you adjust the messaging app to “Delete the messages after 30 days”, you won’t have to struggle back and forth with deleting unwanted conversations in your inbox.

4. Back-Up All Photos in Google Cloud

How To Clear Up Storage On Your Phone

Download the Google photos right now to backup all important memories in a secure space. This way, you can delete all the photos from your iPhone and make space for new stuff easily. So once all of your stuff goes into the Google cloud, delete all photos from iPhone and create space for additional videos and stuff. Luckily, Google cloud offers the opportunity to store as much data as you want to. However, if you don’t have hands-on experience in clearing the iPhone space, tap on the Google photos icon three times. Next, you need to click on settings and manage device storage. The last step is to free up space and click on delete.

5. Delete Unnecessary Stuff

Most of us never want to let go of a few memories. However, the truth be told, not many people ever go down that lane again to extract different memories. In simple words, when was the last time you extracted all the 6 monthly photos from the iPhone to the computer? Surely not! Right?

Therefore, the easiest way to create more space is to delete unnecessary photos, videos, and documents from the iPhone. For this to happen, all you need to do is, sit at one place and spend some time with yourself. Go through the gallery and delete as much stuff as you can. Furthermore, if you don’t want to let go of the old stuff, you can transfer it to the laptop. This will clear up more space and also allow you to stay connected with the old stuff.