Where does all the space on the iPhone go?
Wondering what's taking up all the space on your iPhone? Alex Kidman discovers that his iPhone's mysterious black hole labelled "other" has eaten up 4.3GB of space
We're only a matter of weeks away from what is essentially Apple's sole remaining "big" event for releasing public information, WWDC. OK, I guess the big fruit could co-opt the August Filemaker conference for further announcements, but I wouldn't bet money on that.
Anyway, smart money says that they'll announce some kind of iPhone revision at WWDC, a topic I've touched on previously. I still reckon we won't see anything astonishingly new in the next iPhone, but arguably more of a generational change with upgraded features. Most notably memory, an assertion that's a bit more likely than any other, especially with Apple having a number of lucrative contracts out there in the memory construction space.
And I'd solidly welcome a - for the sake of numbers - 32GB iPhone. Sure, it'd have half the the storage of my Macbook (more or less) - but if my experiences with the 16GB model are any indication, it might just be willing to gobble up a lot of that space for what can only be deemed "other" reasons.
I wish I could be more specific there, but that's exactly the label that Apple uses within iTunes for all the items it doesn't classify as audio, video, photo or applications. Check your iPod or iPhone the next time you sync, and chances are you'll see a section labelled just as "Other".
Last week, I wanted to transfer some video files I'd transcoded from TiVo to the iPod, but was blocked from doing so due to insufficient space on the iPhone. Checking with the specific details, I worked out some music I could lose, and a couple of video files. Applications don't typically take up that much space themselves, so most of those stayed. And then there was the big orange bar helpfully labelled as "Other". And when I say "big", I mean 4.3GB of "big". On a 16GB device, that's a hefty chunk of not-terribly-helpfully labelled storage to be losing.
Checking around the Web, it turns out that Other is perhaps the best name Apple could have given it. Some of it may be Application data that doesn't fit within the application, some of it may be the result of failed or incomplete data synchronisations, and some of it may just be there for the heck of it, and may vanish when you do sync over it. I'd had a few interesting synchronisations - a facet of having my music and video sitting on an external NAS, I suspect, but I didn't think I'd have 4.3GB worth of them.
There are applications out there that essentially "unlock" the iPhone's internal storage, and I could have used one of those to try to ferret out the files, but frankly I'd rather not stuff the iPhone, and I also lacked the fiddling time, as interesting as it may have been. I was curious to see if Apple's own inbuilt solutions could work.
In the case of the iPhone, there's essentially one "solution" that Apple offers, and that's a system restore. I set one off overnight (as my music and video is external, I knew it'd take some time to complete) and went to bed wondering if it'd make any difference at all.
The morning dawned, and I rushed into my study to check the iPhone. Yes, I should have put pants on first, but some things take priority. Anyway, without impacting the files I'd been using on the system, my "Other" grouping had dropped from 4.3GB to 226MB. Looks like those messed up synchronisations had created much bigger problems than I'd anticipated.
All of this leaves me pondering whether a still-a-rumour-but-arguably-very-likely 32GB iPhone would give me that much more wiggle room, or just act as a band-aid solution. This time next year, will I be staring at a 16GB "Other" bar?
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