I need some help recovering space on my wife's iPhone 6. I know enough about how to free up space on my Nexus, but not an iPhone. This isn't a dig on Apple, I just don't understand the ins and outs. I'm happy to see the rumors that the next iPhone will be doubling the space for the same price, because 16GB phones just don't cut it anymore, at least when you can't free up enough space.

For now, I've been following this ritual:

- clear cache on Google Music
- use the Google Photos app to free up device storage of photos that have already been backed up to Google Photos
- and my personal favorite: open iTunes, try to rent the longest HD movie I can find, have it fail, then repeat the process until as much cache can be freed up from other apps as possible

This, unfortunately, gets me a maximum of 1.5GB on her phone these days. I'm able to get a good 2.5GB on my 16GB Nexus, even without paring down on the number of podcast episodes I've downloaded.

The assistance I need from you guys is with Messages. I would like to free up the space that messages is using without losing everything in there and also making it accessible in the future. Is this possible? Currently, Messages is using up 900MB of space.

Again, I'm not going to cast aspersions, but the one thing I like better about Hangouts than Messages is that I'm able to handle the storage of the messages much better. I can archive conversations and let them exist completely in the cloud. Consequently my Hangouts app is taking up 80MB on my phone, and that's only because I have a half dozen unarchived conversations. From what I can tell, Messages doesn't store any of the data on the cloud beyond a full phone backup, and not in any way that's readable. Am I wrong about that?

Do you guys have any other tips for how to free up iPhone space? There's now way my wife's next phone will be 16GB, but I need to figure out what to do for now.

Delete apps that you are not using.

Also, if it's not the biggest model they make in terms of disk space, then consider shelling out the cash for a phone with more disk space.

Though I know it stings because it's apple's own poor disk management control that got you into this mess in the first place, consider this: How much is your time worth, to troubleshoot this, versus, how much would it cost to buy a bigger phone?

...and sell your old one. iPhone's hold their value very well.

Massive operation to both kill all caches and ensure the filesystem is healthy: Plug the phone into iTunes, and do a local encrypted backup. Restore the phone. Choose to restore the backup when prompted.

Reason I bring up the filesystem health aspect, the iPhone uses HFS+ like the Mac. It's pretty dated, and can at times lose track of how much free space really exists. Thankfully Apple is replacing the filesystem in the future, but not likely till iOS 11 in 2017.

Messages, you are correct they aren't stored in the cloud in a readable way, would break the privacy and secure aspect of them. Odds are attachments may be chewing up a lot of space. If you go into a message thread, and then tap details in the upper right, all past attachments are visible when you scroll down. Press and hold on one to get a More option, and you can mass save them out, or delete them.

Yes. Obviously this is the way to go, but when you're a little strapped for cash it's hard to shell out another $100 to a $200 upfront cost, particularly when you're doing an early upgrade because your wife's HTC One is starting to work really terribly, adding another $100 to the upgrade process. Frankly, I prefer buying the whole phone up front and not paying for the rental, but that wasn't an option at the time either.

It also didn't seem necessary before this generation. I've never had more than 16GB of storage, and never ran out of space this fast. But larger camera sensors, 4K video, and newer apps take up more space.


Meh, I don't mind the time. It hasn't been that hard to free up the space every now and then. The steps I laid out above take a total of about five minutes every 2-3 weeks.


That's the most likely solution here. She has a bunch of apps she never uses, but I'm not sure she's thought about deleting them. I'll see how much that frees up.


Thanks! I'll try that one! Good idea. Hopefully that will fix things and free up some more space.


Yeah, I figured it was mostly the media that people have texted to her that's taking up the space. Naturally, this wouldn't be any concern if she had even a 32GB phone, which will be the case in the next lifecycle from what I hear.

Does anyone know how much the storage chips in these phones actually cost? I feel like phones should have started at 32GB for a while now...

Apple doesn't want people to buy the base model 16GB iPhone. The optimal market target is the next model up with more storage space. Good - Better - Best.

The 16GB model is there to provide a price point and a viable entry level model. My take is that the next model up is the memory size which has been tuned for majority use cases. That would be the 64GB model.

Even if the next model round of iPhone has a 32GB base model, I suggest that the next memory size up will still be the more reasonable choice.

The manufacturing cost difference from 16GB to 32GB is unlikely to be more than $5-$10 at the most.

Apple seems to produce the 16GB version just so they can quote a lower price, but they expect people to naturally want more.

My old Android phone (the 1+1) had 64GB flash.
The newer Nexus 5x has only 32GB -- They also did the Apple thing and built one with less (a 16GB offering), but really?

Cheers!

I wonder if anybody has done a study on how people use tablets and phones differently. For a tablet, I have always needed the largest capacity available, mostly due to movies and music. I don't think 16GB would have ever satisfied my needs.

I've occasionally seen suggestions that if Apple boosted the 16GB model up to 32GB that they'd have a supply issue, in that there'd not be enough 32GB chips for them to buy.

However, given that no one apart from Apple really knows how many 16GB phones they sell, I'm not sure I place much faith on such stories

I know quite a few people who own 16GB iPhones and don't seem to have a problem with running out of space. More of an issue normally is Apple's 5GB free iCloud storage limit. I've had loads of silly arguments with people over that:

- they bring me their phone saying they'd had warnings about the iCloud storage space for months
- I find they are out of space and iCloud backup has therefore not run for ages (Apple gives you plenty of warning about this)
- I explain that they either need to delete some stuff or pay Apple the modest £0.79 a month to move to 50GB tier
- they argue over the £0.79
- half of them opt to continue without backups rather than paying Apple £0.79 a month

Also, Apple really should give you 5GB free per device, not 5GB per iCloud account.

When I got my iPhone 6s with 128GB I thought I'd finally have the space to have all my photos and music on device. Which I did to start with.

Sadly my total photos/videos in iCloud is now up to 43GB, add that to the 43GB of music and other assorted stuff and I'm out of space. So I had to turn on the iCloud Photos "optimize storage space" option on a few months ago

So, looks like I "need" a 256GB iPhone...

I wish Apple would use the space more intelligently with "optimize storage space" turned on. At the moment there is 20GB of free space on my phone, it would be nice if they did something like always keep the full size images from the last couple of months on my phone if there were space.

What would be very user friendly, would be to simply include a micro-SD slot on the handset.
Suddenly, unlimited storage, regardless of the age/generation of phone.

That's a "niche" which Samsung is happy to fill.
http://www.androidcentral.com/things-know-about-samsung-galaxy-s7s-sd-card-slot

The decision for Samsung to revert to slower expandable storage with the S7 is a bit of a head scratcher after the S6 when they've been pushing VR hard. Though they didn't adopt the Android 6.0 (and old Windows Phone) feature to be able to merge the built in and SD storage into one, so VR apps could still perform well off the internal storage. Still need to buy the capacity desired up front for certain uses.

Apple hasn't gone down the VR route yet, though their switch to speedy NVMe storage has them ready on the I/O side.

I overall agree though it's far past time for the entry level consumer iPhone to have 32GB. Corporate markets might still like the bit of cost savings across a fleet of employee devices that don't have a need for more then 16GB. Apple has at times maintained a cheaper tier of a device for education or other specialized markets. For some markets, Apple had kept 8GB variants around for longer then the NA/EU markets.

Note: the (slower) part is an addition from Tom, though nothing bad intended nor taken from that.

Looking at the earlier posts in this thread, storage concerns seem primarily for media -- photos and video. And the SD-Cards are plenty large enough (200GByte and counting), and more than fast enough (by an order of magnitude) for such purposes. So yeah, slower than the built-in "SSD" style flash, but still way (up to 12X) faster than the 7MByte/sec for 4K video needs.

I just wish Google would include a slot for them on their Nexus devices. But even Apple is more likely than Google on that front.

Cheers

You can also remind them that they can still back up their phone via a cable to their PC, running iTunes, and pressing the Backup button.

I don't use iCloud backup, but it's not because of money, it's because I want control of where/how my backups are stored and who can access them.

Hear, hear! I thought I was a grumpy old curmudgeon because that's exactly the way I feel, but maybe I'm not the only one.

My backups are such that I have backups of my backups, and even have (at the moment quite out of date) off-premises backups stored in my neighbor's closet. For example, I have no fewer than six copies (original and five backups) of my eBook collection, which now numbers more than 4,000 books.

tanstaafl.

I'm touched that you think the people I know who won't pay £0.79 a month have working installs on their PCs

Besides, for most people a backup that doesn't happen automatically isn't a backup.

It's very easy to locate and delete the Apps that are taking up the most space on an iPhone.
Tap Settings -> General -> Storage & iCloud use -> Manage Storage

There a list will be generated with the biggest apps on top. If you tap the actual app you can also delete it from there.

Just work your way from top to bottom and you'll be freeing up a lot of space in no time!

Fair enough!

I want to thank Tom for his suggestion of backing up and then restoring. I was able to get the phone to go from 1.5-1.8GB of free space max to around 2.7. Sure, it's not a gigantic increase, but relative to the amount that was free before, it's pretty big.

I do like the backup and restore process that Apple has created. It works well, although I dislike all the steps you have to walk through when the phone comes back up. I'm not sure why it needs to set up the wallet and iCloud stuff again, when that should just be treated as settings and data that gets restored to the phone. If it's all encrypted, then why not just store all that too? And if it asks that because it wasn't set up before, then it should recognize that we didn't want it and leave it alone. Other than that, it's certainly easier to move your stuff from one iPhone to another than it is to migrate Android phones, and it's much more comprehensive.

We're going to look into an early upgrade for my wife, perhaps when the 7 gets released, because it really isn't sustainable to deal with this tiny amount of storage. I don't think we'd need more than 32GB, but maybe we'll splurge and get 64. 32 would already give us more than 16 times the space we've been working with up to now.

I agree. The ease with which you can reinstall a backup to an iPhone, or migrate from one iPhone to another, having everything pop up on the new phone exactly as it was on the old phone like photo's, contacts, but also position of icons etc. is one of the main reasons I'm sticking with iPhone. It just doesn't come easier than this.

Shockingly, the same thing happened when I set up the new Nexus 5X here. It used bluetooth or something to get my account details from the old 1+1, and then restored everything via Google (except for two sideloaded widgets) to the exact state/appearance as on the old phone.

From information on this BBS, that's something I did not expect.

I did have to add the two widgets (not available from Google Play), and install SuperSU ("rooting the phone") and Xposed Framework afterward, but that was all.

Probably my information I'm afraid my experience of restoring apps and data (including photos) on Android has been patchy at best

I think it might be just that it has gotten a lot better quite recently or something. And it only works if I first allow everything to be backed up to Google, which normally I don't allow.

And I'm not sure about the photos.. I probably copied those manually because (1) they're huge, and (2) I never grant Google permission to steal those.

Cheers!

Credit card details in the Wallet are tied to the Secure Element in the processor, as are fingerprints. iOS has no access to the data to back it up. The link between the OS and the Secure Element is lost (intentionally) during a wipe process and needs to be set up again. Tickets for movies and such in the wallet will be restored though if using iCloud Wallet synchronization.

iCloud access and aspects of iMessage/Facetime are also dependent on certificates not backed up and intentionally lost during a wipe.

Some of the other prompts like asking for location permission again are tied to past debates about cellphone location tracking that were in the news about 5-6 years ago.

Thanks, Tony, there are a couple on there that I'm going to try out.

It's funny, their last tip is what I'd recommend doing first, but I guess the other tips would affect that list, so I suppose it makes sense.

They really should include Tom's tip, because that did wonders for me.

Is there anyone on this board who has a 64GB iPhone and is running out of space? That line in the article amazed me. I don't think I'd run out of space if I had a 32GB phone, as long as I kept on top of things just a little bit.

Yes

Though not recently, moving to iCloud Photo Library and setting the phone to optimize space helped. As well as the switch initially to iTunes Match and now Apple Music. Currently sitting at 13GB free.

The split of my iOS computing between my smaller iPhone and larger iPad helps too.

A key reason I've used more storage on my pocket computer has been for the motorcycle rides. I like to have music or podcasts local to the device for times I'm outside cellular range. Currently I have to prepare ahead of time for such a trip and let things download before I go.

A chunk of space is also dedicated to TomTom map data. Still need maps that don't require cellular data, and want an app that has routing options built to help find twisty roads.

Indeed I keep TomTom updated on my phone too, just in case, for that same reason. Though I haven't had to resort to using it for a long time.

Those are all good points, Tom. I guess I'm thinking as someone who has already resorted to the cloud for photos and music, and after that there's not much that can take up the free space on a 64GB phone.

Between Google Photos and Music, you can store as little or as much on the device as you want, and Apple's services make that possible too. At that point, it seems to become more of a question of how much time you're going to have between WiFi connections to upload everything (unless you have an unlimited data plan). I have no doubt that personally I would be perfectly fine with a 32GB phone and not really need anything more than that. I might get my wife a 64GB model, though.

I have a 128GB iPhone and I ran out of space.

How? What kind of data is filling that? Are you backing any of that data up to somewhere?

My top ten biggest users of space on my iPhone at the moment:

Music 47GB
Photos 13GB
Videos (a few TV episodes I have queued up to watch, I'm away abroad on holiday at the moment) 7GB
TomTom 2GB
Overcast (podcasts) 2GB
Messages 2GB
Google Maps (with a few offline areas) 1GB
ViewRanger (walking maps) 1GB
iMovie 1GB
Galileo (offline Open Street Map) 1GB

I currently have ~20GB free, but that is only because I've done what I really didn't want to have to do and turned on "optimise space" in iCloud Photo Library. I have 45GB of photos/videos in iCloud and I'd really rather have high quality* versions of them all on my phone

I don't use Apple Music, I tried using it to sync my music library and it was awful. Some things failed to sync completely, some things were replaced with live versions of studio songs, some things were replaced with unrelated tracks, etc. But to be honest even if it worked, I wouldn't really want to use it, I want to have all the music available without worrying about whether what I want to listen to isn't on the phone when I have a crappy Internet connection.

All the real data on the phone is backed up in multiple ways.

Hopefully I'll have an iPhone some day with 256GB of storage and I can turn "optimise space" back off in iCloud Photo Library

* I think I've said it here before, but I wish iCloud Photo Library was more clever about how it used space with "optimise space" turned on. I'd like it to use some of my 20GB of spare space to cache some larger image previews, I'd fed up with saying "let me just show you photo of X" to find that I only have the thumbnail image of the photo and I wait the next few minutes for a viewable image to be available

I should also say that I have even more content that I'd like to be on the phone. I have ~60GB of photos from my DSLR that I'd really love to merge into my iCloud Photo Library at some point and have available on my phone. I daren't do that at the moment.

And I do pity Apple trying to meet the expectations of both people who truly don't need more than 16GB (I know a few people like this) and me, who'd happily try to fill a 512GB phone

There are some situations where online syncing services are still a crappy solution.

I'm away on holiday abroad this week, with limited roaming bandwidth and a very slow broadband connection. I'm taking photos on my waterproof camera and adding them to iCloud Photo Library via my Macbook.

I'd love to show some photos around the dinner table on my iPhone or iPad to the family members I'm away with. But I can't because Photos on the Mac is still busy uploading them to the cloud and may well not finish until I get back home to a real Internet connection.

This is a key reason my next iPad will likely be the maxed out storage version. It tends to be my device that I show photos on the most, especially with family in areas with poor internet coverage. (As in they have cellular where I end up roaming with a whopping 50MB of data before being cut off.)


Someone got to the bottom of the odd matching issues. iTunes Match has a great system that worked in almost all cases, this was the old $25 a year service that is still burred in there somewhere. Apple Music had it's own matching system, and it's where the mismatches started coming in. If someone had iTunes Match still active, it ended up disabling the Apple Music matching and continued working well. Apple at some point retired the Apple Music matching system, and swapped in the iTunes Match one for all Apple Music users. I'm guessing the one in Apple Music initially was from the Beats side.

I also used iTunes Match at one point before Apple Music existed, it also screwed up my music collection in interesting ways.

But even if the syncing was perfect, that isn't how I want my music collection to operate.

I hate the syncing system with a passion.

I just got a 256G iPad Pro and have been juggling with storage issues. Mine is mostly movies and television shows followed by music and photos, though.

Fascinating look at where 200MB of the phone storage is going: https://backchannel.com/an-exclusive-look-at-how-ai-and-machine-learning-work-at-apple-8dbfb131932b

Very interesting. This all definitely shows the different use cases of people and their mobile devices. I really don't have any interest in keeping everything on my phone. Even if I did, I've gone so fully into streaming music that I don't even feel like downloading everything to my phone. I'd rather just stream it, and I'm almost never out of cell or WiFi coverage.

Similarly for photos, any time I want to show someone some photos on my phone, I'm almost always on WiFi, and even if I'm not, my cellular plan is more than enough to bring up a dozen photos of my son to show someone who's interested. One of my absolute favorite things about the Google Photos app is how it completely blurs the distinction between photos on the phone and photos on the cloud. I never even know where it ends and I don't care. I regularly just go in and tell it to wipe all the photos on my phone that have already backed up, and it does it for me, but functionally everything still looks the same.

Between those two things, and the fact that I never watch video on my phone, I honestly don't need more than a 32GB phone. But you guys use your phones differently so I can see how you need way more space. I don't think, however, that any of these companies should have been releasing 16GB phones as of about 2 years ago. That's when they should have moved to 32GB as the baseline. There never should have been a 16GB phone capable of 4K video. That's just anti-consumer.

I certainly can't wait for the iPhone 7 to come out, because then I'll have a lot less work to do

I've heard the 4K talking point several times, and it's worth pointing out no iPhone defaults to recording video in 4K. The default is 1080p at 30fps, resulting in about ~130MB per minute. 4K is ~350MB per minute.

I do mostly agree on the baseline moving to 32GB is likely overdue. At least in two weeks that will likely happen on the high end devices and the talking point can be put to rest.

Any bets on what the next iPhone "gate" issue will be?

Lol, I think the headphone jack is already that.

FYI, it looks like the "rent a movie" trick might not work in iOS 10. My wife tried it tonight and it successfully rented the movie. Anyone know how to get a refund on those? We didn't watch it yet...