How to Delete Other Storage on Your iPhone

I haven't done a how-to over here on the channel in a while I've done them on this site recently but not really on the channel so let's do one today shall we so this one is on something I've heard a lot of people mention that they need help with on their iPhones and that's how to get rid of the mysterious other storage that can be taking up a ton of space and seems to not go away no matter what you do Thanks to everyone who commented asking me to do a video for this over on my other video on how to free up your iphone storage which if you need more help with that I'd suggest checking that out as even though it's an older video it still works today in this video though we'll focus on that annoying other storage in particular now first to see if your issue is the other storage head to Settings General iPhone storage here you'll see a little bar graph that'll show you using colors what amount of storage is taken up by what category of item other is usually the one to the far right and depending on a lot of factors it might have gotten out of control and is much larger than it needs to be so really quick what is other well basically it's kind of a catch-all for a lot of different files that your iPhone happens to save things like your series files some settings files and iOS updates sometimes gets stuck in there can take up a ton but a big portion of it usually are cache files these are files that apps in the phone store temporarily on the phone storage in order to use something and in theory at least should be deleted automatically by the system as soon as they are deemed not needed or the device is low on storage so an example of this is if you're streaming a four gig movie it might take up four gigs of other storage while watching it but once you finish it and close the app those four gigs should be deleted since it's no longer needed at least that's how it should work in theory now the problem here lies in that things can get stuck in there sometimes as iOS just never decides to remove them and also those update files I mentioned seem to get stuck in here pretty often now unfortunately there is no good way in iOS to clear out all of the caches we can try and clear out a few of them though at least and see if that helps get rid of enough of that other storage for you and if not then I have a final option that'll get rid of all of it at once for the most part if we need to so firstly let's clear safaris cache to do that head to Settings Safari and tap on clear history and website data and then confirm then after this and every one of these steps really you can go back to Settings General iPhone storage wait a sec fer to refresh and see if that cleared enough of other if not we can go to the next step now other apps that you have on the phone also have their own caches unfortunately as I mentioned earlier there isn't really an easy way to remove these but we can kind of remove them and all be at a slightly drastic way but honestly it's probably something you should be doing anyway so first we're gonna head to Settings General iPhone storage now here you'll see a list of your apps from the ones taking up the most storage to the least you can choose one of two options you can either tap the recommendation at the top to automatically offload apps also manually found in settings iTunes automatically offload apps and this will essentially uninstall any apps you haven't used in a long time and free up their cache as well as storage and opposed to specifically uninstalling them as soon as you tap them it will simply redownload the app leaving the icon where it was and you'll just have to wait for that to reinstall and then the data etc will all be back we left it but in all likelihood it'll clear that apps cache the other option is you can manually look for apps that are taking up the most space and the decide which ones you don't need and tap on them and then tap offload app for each of them to force it to clear it from the phone in the same way and then again after you finish that for as many apps as you want we can check Settings General iPhone storage and see if that helped a little now hopefully you're lucky and that cleared up enough that other storage and you can stop right here but there's a good chance that it probably didn't and so there is one final way to make sure that we clear as much of the cache and as much of other as possible and that's by doing a backup and a restore now I know that sounds scary but so long as you do the backup it's actually pretty painless and all of the things that you have on there will come right back when we're done so to properly do that backup on the phone we're gonna connect to Wi-Fi first then go to settings on your name at the top and then tap on iCloud in here turn everything on that you want to save anything you do not turn on will be deleted so triple check that everything is on now you'll actually notice that I leave photos off on mine but that's because mine are backed up to Google photos instead since it's free unlike iCloud storage and also I'm pretty integrated with Google services if we're honest now you can check out the affirmation video on freeing up space at the link here but if you haven't done that then make sure that photos are turned on here so that you don't lose your photos and videos and they will instead be backed up to iCloud now once everything you want to save is on scroll down and tap on iCloud backup turn on iCloud backup and then tap backup now and you're gonna wait for it it could take a while depending on how much you have on here but then eventually it will say the last successful backup with the time next to it that it was done and when you have that you're all set now depending on your iCloud storage plan it might tell you that you need to upgrade your iCloud storage to accommodate the backup this is the reason I back up my photos elsewhere as they are the biggest culprit of the storage so to try and make a little extra space if you don't want to go the route that I did with Google Photos go to settings tap on your name iCloud manage storage tap on backups and then tap on any of the backups that are for devices you no longer own or need and tab delete backup repeat this until you only have the devices in there that you need hopefully that'll help but if not you could just pay the extra money for the more iCloud storage it's honestly not too expensive at least as you get 50 gigs for $0.99 a month now if you're also still nervous about what we're about to do you can also just take all of those photos and videos and either save them to your computer by connecting to iTunes or upload them to Dropbox or Google Drive or any of those other services you have as well this way it's backed up twice essentially and then that way you can be sure that you won't lose anything if you're nervous next once that is confirmed to be backed up and that everything you chose to backup was selected let's restore the phone so go to settings reset erase all content and set and then we'll ask you to confirm multiple times be sure to read each of these and understand what it's saying but then go ahead and confirm all of that and then you can go through your normal setup process and there's gonna be a point where it's going to ask you to take your other phone and bring it close to this phone in order just hit set up manually and then it'll eventually prompt you to restore from a backup we're gonna do that and use our iCloud backup that we just made so tap on iCloud backup and then tap on the one that is the most recent for this device then continue to follow the prompts to have that restored it will take a bit and eventually after it reboots itself a few more times you'll be back on your normal home screen and back to the way that you were you will notice that a lot of your apps are grayed out and what's happening is those are actually read downloading in the background it allows you to use the phone for now but those will eventually all download and be back to the way they were before we started and then finally we can go to Settings General iPhone storage and see if that finally helped the other storage there we go I hope that helps some of you out there I will leave a link below to my actual website where I'll have the written tutorial for anybody that wants to see that also if there are any tips than anyone else has to help with this please leave those in the comments and I'll add those to that website that page just so that this can be updated a little bit easier if anybody needs it if you like me though please thumbs up at our shared it's really appreciate it also check out the rest of channel if you like what you see there please subscribe and ding the bell and I store subscribe so you get notified when I do new videos as always though regardless thanks for watching you

Channel: TheUnlockr

Views: 6,491,347

Keywords: how to delete other on iphone, how to delete other storage on iphone, delete other storage, other storage, how to clear other storage on iphone, how to delete other storage, how to clear other storage, how to delete other storage ios, how to clear other storage ios, ios, iphone, apple, free up storage, clear storage on iphone, free up storage on iphone, save iphone storage, iphone storage

Id: 5Fw9riU588I

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020