Mrs S has set me (an android user) the task of sorting out her phone. It is a 5s. The phone is telling me she has used 5.04GB of its 5GB storage. All media has been moved to iCloud and deleted from the device. In Manage storage the largest app is 2.16mb and to cumulative volume of the apps is around 1GB, so the the bloody hell is using up the other 4GB?

I’ve been messing around with this for an hour now and it is doing my head in! As it is such a rubbish phone I cannot even chuck in an SD card to help out with capacity.

Has she got the Facebook app on it. It sometimes goes a bit wrong and expands to take the space available. Uninstall and reinstall will fix it for a time until it does it again.

Otherwise try a factory reset.

Probably the iOS 🙁

My wife junked her 8G iPhone by taking a video. I’m suspect that 8G iPhones are (IMHO) not up to the job of being much more than a phone and browser 🙁

No media on it at all, photos and videos all back up and deleted from device.

No Facebook app.

Looks like a reset is on the cards

pop a SD card in ?

#justfordrac 😀

2.16mb sounds tiny for a largest app. My contacts alone is 3 times that. If your sure you’ve deleted do a soft reset (hold power and home) and check the storage again.

I seem to recall moving media to the cloud doesn’t always free up space, maybe it doesn’t re allocate the memory or something. Photos can be an issue, I know of a glitch where there are loads of photos saved iOS can’t see – if you’ve cleared out the recently deleted try manually setting the date on the phone to a year ago, then go back to the recently deleted and see what’s in there, delete as required. If your not an iOS user you may not even have spotted the recently deleted folder of photos!

8GB is smallest iPhone

Settings / General / Storage / Manage Storage – check app by app (edit I see you’ve tried that – does sound odd)

Some apps store a lot, eg whatsapp can store lots of pictures etc

My wife’s 5 is 8GB – no music but a few videos, lots of pictures, lots of apps ….

Also iTunes has best graphic of storage use

Sorry, meant 216gb for largest app.
Storage is definitely capped at 5.24gb

reset it, and setup as new phone. all your user data(notes, contacts etc) will still be there just not apps

5gb is the free iCloud storage limit.

216gb for largest app.

Third time lucky. That should be 216mb.

what he says

its your icloud storage that’s full not the phone

settings > general > about > capacity and available.

After apps Email often takes up a lot of space. I dont think 8gb is enough space for fulling functioning ios.

As above…. 5gb is the max,free iCloud storage.
I got a SanDisk iexpand memory stick to store photos and vids, I just have the backup stored on iCloud.

pop a SD card in ?

#justfordrac

Ha!

OP you’re talking about cloud storage you can buy more for a few pence a month.

She already pays for 50GB a month of cloud storage.

In Settings/General Storage & iCloud it clearly states phone capacity is 5GB and iCloud is 50GB (of which she is using about 5GB).

In Settings/General/About it says capacity is 5.25GB

Phone capacity is definitely 5GB (or thereabouts)

Ah clearer now.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201656

That will give you an idea.

Sorry this way is easier.

Settings –> General –> Storage & icloud –> Manage

There is a problem with iOS where excess memory gets allocated to apps – my wife’s phone had this recently and on fixing it she had gigabytes free again. Also, there’s something weird that happens with photos where it doesn’t delete them properly which I recall fixing by winding the date back and clearing them out.

Have you plugged it into a computer and looked at it in iTunes? When I had a iPhone, I had a build up of “other” data, which didn’t show up in the ‘usage’ bit of settings. If that’s the problem, there are answers on the web (I can’t remember what I did)

Deleting from tHe phone often won’t actually clear the memory until you next synch with iTunes.

Messages? If she sends/receives lots of pictures txt message app will get pretty big. But it should be on the app list.

Note also that icloud photos can also be stored on your device depending on settings. Its a new one I think where you get los res versions on the phone, not sure how that would show in the storage. Its a setting in the icould menu for optimise iphone storage. It might be back loading photos to the phone you thought you had removed*

*I could be wrong about all this but thought it was worth a mention, further research required though.

Do you have several email accounts on the Phone?

Often this takes up a lot of storage, if you sync it to a Mac via iTunes sometimes you’ll see “other” as a lot of memory taking up. The fix for this is to delete all email accounts and set them back up on the phone again.

HTHs

Thanks, will try both later.

I love my android.

Often this takes up a lot of storage, if you sync it to a Mac via iTunes sometimes you’ll see “other” as a lot of memory taking up. The fix for this is to delete all email accounts and set them back up on the phone again.

The solution is delete your emails or use IMAP email accounts.

You may find that when plugged in to itunes thr category “other” may be causing the issue. Nobody knows what this refers to and we are not supposed to ask. I find this can be cleared down a lot by simply resetting the network settings (settings>general>reset>reset network settings). This might restart your phone and will also require you to reinput your wifi network password but hopefully it will reduce the data in “other” thus freeing up space.

Attempt to download lord of the rings from the iTunes Store.
It won’t download but if you do it several times it clears caches and stuff and frees up lots of space.
Have seen 1gig suddenly appear after three goes at this.

Ymmv

Have you plugged it into a computer and looked at it in iTunes?

That’s what I was gonna say.

Or just buy her a new phone ya skinflint 😉

I appreciate apple are in it for the money but a 128 chip costs between 20 and 50 quid.
Why don’t apple just make the big phone and sell it for the price of a small one as a thank you to all their loyal customers?
It doesn’t cost £300(?) to make the memory bigger.

iPhones are terrible at managing storage and icloud is even worse. When I have icloud photo storage switched on with it managing space it still constantly says it is running out of space. Check storage allocation and it because there are too many photos and videos. But this is the specific media that iCloud photo storage is meant to be managing.

My advice, give up and buy a much larger iPhone, thats what I did.

Arpp another thing..

In photos, if you delete photos off your phone, they then go into a folder “on your phone” called deleted photos all this really does is duplicate the deleted photos and it’s a simple action to go to the folder and delete those photos in that folder.

32GB £599
128GB £699
256GB £799

just pay the approx 70p per month for 10x as much iCloud storage

zilog6128 – Member
just pay the approx 70p per month for 10x as much iCloud storage

He’s already said they are paying for 50gb of extra icloud storage…

in that case just get a moto g3….

Spotify account with a load of downloaded music, perhaps?

OP iTunes (certainly Mac version) has the best graphic of storage usage. As abover “other” can be huge, often email attachments for me.

I have never had the phantom memory usage but perhaps its because I backup to computer at least once a month

Also just checked as iOS takes about 3GB so if phone is 8 5 left is corrects. Also I posted earlier the wife’s phone was 8 but its 16

Do you have a downloaded but not installed iOS update ?

Anyway iTunes and a sync thrn restore from backup seems like a plan

Finally 😉 … “just add an sd card to android” isn’t true as it depends on phone amd andrpid version. FIL new phone 5.1 ‘driod SD card can’t be used for apps just photo/video

Is it the phone or iCloud that is full? The latter will most likely be backups. As the smallest 5s was 16gb I don’t think it’s the OS thas the issue. Frankly I’d be tempted to back it up to a computer, do a full reset from this back up. Oh and once you’ve done that clear the backups from iCloud.

Edit is there more than one iOS device backing up to this account?

Sorry…slight tangent/hijack but I’m dealing with similar space constraints.
Anyone know why Strava has 863MB of “documents and data” on my phone ?
Inclined to delete and reinstall.

Err… welcome to the forum.

Since he resurrected the thread though, did you sort it? I’m pretty sure no iPhones were 8gb, at least not since the 3G, so something is taking huge quantities of her memory.

I’m pretty sure no iPhones were 8gb, at least not since the 3G,

5 range were available in 8Gb.