You can quickly learn what is using up all the space on your iPhone from the settings menu if you’ve ever been curious about it. What is “Other Storage” or, as Apple now refers to it in iOS 15, “System Data” is one of the most often asked topics concerning storage on your iPhone. These recommendations also apply to your iPad.
This post is intended to assist you in understanding what is taking up your iPhone’s “Other Storage” and how you may eliminate some of it to make room on your device.
When trying to download an update or install a new app on your iPhone and running out of space, you could find yourself in need of some more storage.
You can erase certain applications and data from your iPhone to free up some space, but if you’ve already done that, you might want to consider other storage options.
How do I check my iPhone storage?
By heading to Settings > General > iPhone Storage on your smartphone, you can check what your iPhone storage is being used for. You may get an idea of how much space you might be able to free up on your iPhone by seeing which applications are using up the most space on your device.
What is other storage on the iPhone and how can I free it up?
On your iPhone, you can find the other section at the bottom of the list of apps. There are two listings there: one for iOS and one for System Data.
There are several ways to clear some of the other storage on your iPhone, which is essentially storage that is used by a variety of apps on your device.
Try clearing your Website Data and History
Clearing your website data and history in Safari is one simple approach to get rid of some of the other storage or system data on your device.
You must go to Settings > Safari and scroll down to Clear History and Website Data in order to delete website data and history.
After completing this, you can check to see if it has changed how much of your devices other storage is being used.
Try changing messages from Forever to 30 days or 1 year
The default setting for message storage on our devices is Forever, which can take up space if we have a lot of messages. This is another option we have.
By going to Settings > Messages, scrolling down to Keep Messages, and selecting 1 Year or 30 Days, you can change this setting from Forever to 30 Days or One Year. All of your older messages will be deleted if you do this after the time period you select.
This hasn’t cleared much space what else can I do?
If this hasn’t substantially reduced the amount of space needed by Other on your iPhone, there could be a problem that is using the storage. On my iPhone, I have personally gone through this a few times.
A backup and restore of your smartphone is one thing you may do to potentially remove this storage; this is the nuclear option because it entails entirely backing up your iPhone, deleting it, and doing a full restoration. Depending on how much data you have on your smartphone, this might take some time.
Offloading any useless applications from your iPhone is another thing you can do to free up some space. You could have several apps loaded on your smartphone that you no longer use.
To achieve this, click to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, where you will see an option labelled Offload Unused Apps. Using this function, I was able to free up about 4.7GB of space on my iPhone.