There’s nothing more frustrating than a beautiful iPhone that has zero GB of storage left. Especially when you see that a lot of room is actually taken up by a mysterious “other” section that just seems to grow bigger over time.
In today’s handy video, I’m going to show you a few quick methods to clear your phone of unnecessary files, giving you more room for favorite albums, pictures and apps.
Get rid of unneeded iOS files
The “other” section tends to be full of Safari bookmarks, text-message attachments and calendar entries. There are two main ways to remove this data from your iOS device. The best method is to wipe your device. Back up up your iPhone on iTunes first, then go to Settings > General > Reset and choose Erase All Content. Then connect your iOS device to iTunes and restore from backup.
These steps erase all the cookies, temporary files and so on. There may some “other” data left, but it should be significantly reduced.
If you don’t want to wipe your phone, but still need to regain some of your storage space, make sure to check out the video below for more tips.
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Ste Smith is Cult of Mac’s video guy based in the UK. Ste has been working in the media industry for over 8 years and is a keen Apple fan. Follow Ste on Twitter @stesmith10 and Facebook.
18 responses to “How to delete mysterious ‘other’ data from your iPhone and iPad”
These are some good tip! I just wish apps like Facebook and Instagram would have a “Clear Cashes” feature in their settings, similar to “Feedly” which I think is brilliant.
I just jailbreak, use iFile, and delete the cache folders from all of my apps every once in a while and recover a few gigs. Works like a charm
Why is this a video? Just tell us.
I assume because this way they get the view counts on the article and then view counts on the video as well. And by giving the most pain in the ass tip in the article of restoring your phone guarantees most people will watch the video.
I am deaf. How does the video help me? Where can I find the text version?
Turn on the subtitles….
Lot of people are novices and don’t know how to wipe other. They flood the apple board with “I have 10GBs of Other Memory used”.
I have an iOS app called Battery Doctor. It has a function that allows me to clear my iPhone and iPad of extraneous data. I can also clear my cache with the app. I constantly clear mi Google app and Safari app. However, because the apps I delete are always available to restore from the app shoo free, I constantly delete games and other apps, knowing if I really need them again, I can download them and then delete them after I’ve finished with them. Another thing I do, is I regularly download docs and photos to my computer. This way I always have space. Cheers.
I know at least 2 other ways to earn some space on iOS device.
1. Try to force iOS to perform memory cleaning. I use Kruptos.app for it. It’s great “on-the-go”, when I don’t have access to computer.
2. Try using PhoneClean. It’s an app for Mac and PC that scans memory and allows to delete unnecessary data. It used to be free, now it cost some money. It also works.
PhoneClean FTW.
Phone Clean Pro, it just works fine.
It’s better to restore from iCloud. I’ve had my “other” return when I restore from iTunes, but not iCloud.
Beautiful video, and great tips. Sadly I have had to restore my iPhone 6 4 times now due to 60+GB of Other creeping in. Restore seems to be the only thing to do at that point.
icleaner via cydia
i find that when i do a sync to itunes, it copies out the older versions of apps from my iphone and puts them into the trash on the computer.
Clear all that ‘other’ data from your phone….erase all content….
Well yeah, that’s a good idea!
If you sync your iOS device with your computer it also clears log files and crash data files.
Battery Doctor works well for me to keep the “other” to a minimum. But when “other” reaches 2+ GB I start to think about reset, which is a huge pain. I have enough room that I can ignore “other” for awhile before I resort to reset.