How to check the storage on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch — Apple Support

Restore your device to a recent backup

Corruptions in your operating software can take up a lot of “Other” storage on your iPhone. You can fix this by restoring your device to a recent backup using iTunes or Finder. You shouldn’t lose any data doing this, but it does reinstall your operating software.

Use a third-party application such as OmniDiskSweeper

A range of third-party applications exist to get rid of “Other” or “System” storage on your Mac. Many of these make it easier to locate the problematic files or automatically remove unnecessary files from your system files.

The most common app to use for this is OmniDiskSweeper, made by the Omni group. This app shows you the largest files on your drive making it easy to trash them.

You should independently research any third-party app before installing it on your Mac. Particularly apps claiming to clean up or speed up your Mac: they’re often bogus.

Erase your device and reinstall the latest software

You already restored your device from a backup, but if you still can’t get rid of “Other” storage on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you may need to erase it entirely.

We suggest you do this using DFU mode (Device Firmware Update mode), which erases and rewrites every single line of software and firmware on your device. It’s the deepest level of restore available to iOS and iPadOS devices.

After erasing your device, set it up as new and import data using iCloud, iTunes, or Finder.

Entering DFU mode can get complicated, so we recommend you check out this separate article we already wrote explaining how to do it for each device.

Reinstall the operating software on your Mac

If you still can’t get rid of the “Other” or “System” storage on your Mac, it may be time to pull out the big guns. Use the recovery partition on your Mac to reinstall your operating software. This rewrites each line of code in macOS and hopefully removes the corruption that’s eating up all your storage.

Reinstalling macOS shouldn’t affect your content, such as photos, videos, or documents. But we recommend you make a new backup of your Mac anyway.

Clear website data and history from safari:

1. Go to Settings > Safari.
2. Scroll down and tap ‘Clear History and Website Data.’
3. Confirm you want to ‘Clear History and Data.’

   

Connect external devices or servers with files on ipad

Delete old conversations from messages:

1. Go to Settings > Messages.
2. Under ‘Message History,’ choose to keep messages for 30 days.

   

How do i get rid of “other” storage on my iphone, ipad, or ipod touch?

Follow the steps below to get rid of “Other” or “System” storage on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Continuously check your storage after each step to make sure you haven’t already fixed the problem.

And be sure to let us know how you get on in the comments section. We’d love to hear what worked for you, what didn’t work for you, and what your device storage looks like now!

Click here to skip to the Mac instructions.

How do i get rid of “other” storage on my mac?

Use the steps below to reduce “Other” or “System” storage on your Mac. We’ve listed the steps from most to least common, hopefully you don’t need to use all of them.

How to check the storage on a mac:

1. From the menu bar, go to  > About This Mac > Storage.
2. Hover your mouse over each section in the chart to see its category.
3. Click ‘Manage’ to see a detailed breakdown of your Mac storage.
4. For the most accurate storage readings, use Finder instead:
   1. From the menu bar in Finder, select Go > Computer.
   2. Control-click a file or folder and select Get Info to see its size.
   3. Check each folder on your Mac to discover what uses the most space.

      

How to clear caches in all apps

Once you’ve waited a moment in the iPhone or iPad Storage section of Settings, your device will offer a couple of recommendations for saving space in general. Underneath that it will also show a list of apps.

These are the applications that are using the most space on your iPhone, ranked from most to least. Most of that space will be storage of items that you want to keep, though, or that you can move to other devices.

For instance, you may see the Camera app showing that it is using many gigabytes of storage. Clearly, you can get back some space by backing that up and then removing it.

That’s not an «Other» type of storage, though, and there is no way to determine just how much of the space taken up is in that category. If you know that you have backups of all your documents, however, you can take a brute force approach to reclaiming «Other» space.

Again, be sure you’ve got every image, video, or anything else that you want, then delete the app. You can do that by the regular way of editing your home screen, or you can do it via the list of apps taking up storage.

Tap on any one of them and you’ll get options to Offload or Delete the app. Delete it.

Offloading takes the app itself off your phone, and presumes that it can do this because when you want to use it you will of course be in an area with good Wi-Fi or cell signal. It doesn’t touch your data, though, and that means you can’t tell whether any «Other» space is being taken up.

Deleting the app and then reinstalling it certainly wipes these «Other» caches. Or at least it does for now. The cache will build up again over time so this isn’t a permanent or even a convenient solution.

Unless you’ve changed any setting or painstakingly deleted conversations, Messages still contains all your text messages. All of them. Years of them. It is possible to remove these old ones, but unfortunately it’s a bit of a nuclear option.

Without a third-party app, you can’t easily archive off your Messages before you delete any of them. So be sure you want to do it, or leave this as a last resort.

How to delete device backups in macos mojave or earlier:

1. Open iTunes on your Mac.
2. From the menu bar, go to iTunes > Preferences > Devices.
3. Select the backup you want to delete and click ‘Delete Backup.’

   

How to reinstall macos from a recovery partition:

1. Shut down your Mac by going to  > Shut Down.
2. Wait at least 30 seconds for your Mac to fully power off.
3. Press the power button to turn on your Mac, then immediately press and hold the command R keys.
4. Keep holding the keys until you see the Apple logo, a Utilities window should appear afterward.
5. Select Reinstall macOS and follow the on-screen prompts.

   

We hope this guide made it easy to get rid of all that “Other” or “System” storage on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. If it keeps coming back, just return to this article and try a different step.

And don’t forget to let us know how you get on in the comments below!

Ipad storage size who should get a 32gb ipad or 64gb ipad air or mini?

Very few buyers should consider a 32GB iPad. Though its $329 price can look appealing to first-time buyers, the $10.28/GB storage cost is one of the worst deals Apple offers — comparable only to the 64GB iPad Air at $9.36 per gigabyte.

Powerful features

Officially, Apple will be supporting ExFAT, FAT32, HSF , and APFS storage devices though APFS support is absent in the first beta.

Even though we are currently testing in beta, external storage is going to be huge with iOS 13 and iPadOS when it becomes fully available. There is so much you can do and it is all easy and intuitive. Multiple Files windows and support from external apps makes the iPad Pro an even more capable professional device.

Apple will be releasing iOS 13 and iPadOS this fall alongside macOS 10.15 Catalina, watchOS 6, and tvOS 13.

Thanks to Steve Troughton-Smith for his assistance with this piece.

Check out all of AppleInsider’s other features regarding the new features coming in Apple’s latest updates.

Quick tips

If “Other” or “System” storage is filling up your device, we’ve summarised how to get rid of it with these quick tips:

Remove your recently deleted icloud photos:

1. Go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted.
2. In the top-right, tap ‘Select’ then choose ‘Delete All.’
3. Due to the way iCloud works, you should also temporarily change the date to at least 40 days in the future:
   1. Go to Settings > General > Date & Time.
   2. Turn off the ‘Set Automatically’ button.
   3. Change the date to at least 40 days in the future.
   4. Go Home, then return to Settings and correct the date.

      

What if i don’t want to update my device?

What’s the difference between “system” and “other” storage?

You might notice a lot of storage on your device goes to “System” as well as “Other.” There isn’t always a clear-cut difference between these categories, but typically, “System” includes your device’s operating software.

As well as some system files, “Other” storage also catches other file types that are too few in number to be categorized.