iPhone “Other System Storage”
 

My iPhone storage was almost full, but nearly a half of it was “other system resources” which is a bunch of caches and other clutter. I tried everything to delete caches and similar, too little effect. Finally I tried the “nuclear option”. Backed up my iPhone, wiped it clean and reset, then restored from backup. Success - recovered 25 GB of storage. My phone only has 64 GB so that’s a lot. Yes, still using the old iPhone XR.

It's probably going to fill back up. Hopefully, it takes a while. Do you use social media apps like facebook, instagram, etc...? Those tend to build up cache.

Pandora will also use some cache to download music for use offline.

I like my iPhone, but it has several really stupid and annoying "features" like you found.

One of the worst I fight is, if i create a new contact on my phone, it insists on adding that contact to the All iPhone group. I want to put it into my various folders in Outlook. All my email and contacts are on my Outlook account, and I can use my computers to access the exact same email and contacts.

The only way I can get the contacts to go to the folders I want is to email the contact to myself, and save it in my Outlook on my computer.

I don’t see Other System Storage. My biggest offender is Large Attachments in Messenger.

As an example, I just checked and the largest file is a 20MB video that I texted to my wife.

So that video is currently occupying as much as 100MB of space.

In my photo library, in my cloud account, in my message attachments and in my wifes message attachments. If she saved the video to her library, it’s probably in her cloud account too.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If I were cynical, I'd speculate that Apple and other smartphone makers are not in a big hurry to provide an easy way for users to flush the "Other System Storage".

Don't get me wrong, I like iPhones a lot. Just bought my daughter an iPhone 12 mini for the e-sim feature, so she can have both her French and US SIMs active. But I try to keep our old iPhones going for as long as practical, and the only problem I have with this rather-aged iPhone XR is the storage filling up.

You can go in and delete attachments out of text messages, if that's what you mean by messenger.

Our previous (and first) iPhones with the 6 with the big screen with 64Gb storage. Yeah, it was always a bit of a battle. When we finally upgraded, the 11s had been out a while, and we found XS new available via our cell provider at a pretty steep discount, so we ended up with 512Gb models (all that was available, and still cheaper than the smallest storage endowed 11) It's awesome having all of that space. I highly recommend it. Then the annoying thing that you have to deal with is the constant "your cloud storage is almost full..." messages. I do use iCloud a bit, but prefer to have my stuffed backed up locally.

This is irritating. “Other System Storage” was 8GB shortly after I restored the phone, and 24 hours later is 10GB. I don’t understand why there is 8GB of this bloat almost immediately, or why it increases 2GB in a day. I’m still over 20GB better than before wipe/restore (before, was using 62GB, now 41GB) but this is bugging me.