Clearing "other data" on iPhone or iPad

If your iPhone or iPad runs out of disk space, chances are that a lot of it will be identified as “other” data. This category is useless, in that it tells you nothing about what the data is, nor is there any capability of clearing it.

You could try clearing the cache of all your apps (which you have to do one by one!), removing old email and doing various other time consuming activities in an attempt to reduce the amount of “other” data, but this made little difference when I tried it.

In my experience the only reliable way of clearing this “other” data is to backup and reset your device. To do this you will need to plug it in to a PC that has iTunes on it, then use iTunes to back up the device before resetting it.

Personally I wouldn’t trust iTunes (nor anything from Apple) to back up your device, so I would back it up yourself to an external hard disk before trying the iTunes backup/reset. This lack of trust could be because I’m paranoid. Or it could be because Apple have written an OS where you have to periodically back up and reset an entire device in order to stop it filling with crap and grinding to a halt.

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Last modified: 12/01/2016 Tags: ,

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