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Am I the only one that finds this absurd? (lemmy.yachts)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world
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Is there anything I can do about this extremely vague block of data that’s taking up 30% of my phone’s storage? Mind you, this isn’t the operating system itself, as that’s listed as its own category.

EDIT: I tried (a) backing up to my computer, factory resetting, then restoring from backup and (b) setting the date years in the future. Neither worked, in fact (a) actually increased my system data to 34 GB! What DID end up working was updating my iOS from 18 to 26, which I had to do from my computer via iTunes since my phone was full. Apparently major system updates reset system data

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[–] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is your phone out of storage?

This value will fluctuate according to system needs

iOS might wait to purge the cache until it needs the space

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That was my hope on my old MacBook Pro, too, with 140 out of 256GB of disk space taken by “Other storage” rendering it almost unusable. It never really shrunk it when it should have, had to hard reset everything. Really let down by this closed down automatic shit… Time Machine and backups work well, but this storage piling is a real issue on Apple products.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    It was indeed out of storage but system data usage wasn’t budging. After some research, I found out there’s apparently a bug that prevents cache from being properly cleared.

    See my post edit for what ended up working

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    • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The advice I’ve seen is to back up your phone (iCloud or iTunes), factory reset, then restore your backup.

    These things get bigger and bigger the older your phone is, because OS updates seem to always leave more and more shit laying around (probably for disaster recovery in case the update goes sideways).

    Windows has a command you can run to purge all the old update shit to free up space. I wish Apple would get off their ass and implement the same.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Cable backup to Mac’s the best way for some reason is that right?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    iCloud or local Mac backup is the same in terms of data. A local Mac backup is significantly faster.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Local backup saves sensitive data which doesn’t go into iCloud backups. For the most part it doesn’t matter because that data can usually be restored from the keychain and secure enclave, but that takes longer and can still miss some bits you have to enter yourself.

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    • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Metadata, caches, obsolete files and stuff, uncleaned leftovers from miscellaneous apps, out of sync forgotten bytes, and the Ghost in the machine…

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    [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This happened to me and it ended up being the mail app.

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    • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Work computer recently had 400gb of 500 filled with system data stuff. /Tmp doesnt get cleaned except for on reboot.

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    • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Just as well Apple doesn’t charge a premium for storage space ✊💦💦💦

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    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I've found it to happen when an app schedules something for deletion, but the OS doesn't get around to actually completing the deletion operation for one reason or another. A normal restart seems to fix it up for me.

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    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Im not endorsing it, but It makes more sense when you realize that the difference between the different Apple OSs is only the UI. They are all the same OS called Darwin. They have gotten sloppy about the optimizations between devices since they started spinning their own silicon.

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    [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    YMMV, but this problem went away for me when I disabled syncing to my MacBook via WiFi. My guess is that it was caching backup images but never successfully copying and removing them.

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    A big chunk of that is probably on-device AI models that shareholders demand Apple force on its customers to demonstrate that they’re not being left behind.

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    • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    When I had the problem on my wife's phone, the answer ended up being text messages and safari. This was 5 years ago so I don't know if it changed but despite the apps saying it used x storage under storage, it was actually kept in System.

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    [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Apply the trick of flight mode and forward 1 year in system date

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    • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Higher resolution displays need higher res assets.

    But also, instead of building more efficient stuff, the pattern is to just take up resources because Moore’s law.

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    • [+] -16 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Unused storage is wasted storage. The system will free up space when other apps require it.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    That's more for ram than SSD. Unnecessary ssd use wears it out.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Only for write operations. Reads are effectively free, and cached files are invariably predominantly read heavy.
    Even then, the wear effects of writes on SSDs are exaggerated. Improvements in the technology and wear leveling have made them roughly as reliable as spinning disk.

    For a phone, the storage is expected to remain viable beyond the expected usage lifetime of the device. It doesn't really matter if caching wears storage a little faster if the device is inoperable before it's a problem.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you’re lucky it will clear it. There were some folks complaining that they couldn’t install a system update because there “wasn’t enough room” according to the update process. This despite caches that could be cleared or apps that could be unloaded.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Indeed; my system data is currently at 17.78GB, I have 21GB free, and the last OS update still required me to offload a bunch of apps to free up enough space to install—despite there ALSO being a 10GB reserve for OS updates.

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    • [–] -3 points 1 year ago

    Tracking your behaviors for advertising companies and governments creates a lot of data.

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