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A friend of mine has an iPhone 8 running iOS 14.6, and they're running out of space:

  • In the Settings -> Storage, iOS claims that WhatsApp is using up 14.99GB of "Documents & Data":

    Storage Settings

  • However, opening WhatsApp and managing storage, it claims it's only using 2.91GB:

    Within WhatsApp

2.91 GB is much closer to the total amount of media stored in the WhatsApp conversation on the phone, so I believe the app is correct, and I'm not sure where the other 12GB are coming from.

The difficult part is twofold:

  1. First, my friend doesn't want to clear out all conversations or delete the app and reinstall it, because the conversations and media that are on there are important to them. I would just like the phone to recognize that it only has 3GB of photos and images.

  2. Second, all of the results I get from internet searches relating to WhatsApp storage on iOS provide very general advice relating to clearing out old conversations, deleting media, etc. This doesn't really represent the bug I'm seeing here (if it is a bug) that there is a huge mismatch between iOS and WhatsApp storage counts.

Any advice?

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  • 1
    Is this helpful by any chance ? apple.stackexchange.com/questions/212471/…
    – Erdal
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 13:31
  • @Erdal unfortunately not, that question refers to backing up your phone's data into iCloud, which can be done one of two ways, via the app itself or via a full phone backup. Doing both doubles the amount of space used in iCloud. The issue I'm seeing is a 5x increase in space used on the device itself
    – Jake
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 14:30
  • I'm experiencing this too. Other users have reported that backing up to iCloud and reinstalling could help.
    – Hannes Hertach
    Commented Aug 23, 2021 at 15:31

1 Answer 1

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I'm experiencing this issue too. Backing up to iCloud and reinstalling the app might help, however you may lose some data.

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  • Two more points: 1-Some useless Whatsapp data go to "other" part of your iPhone. 2-Before reinstalling Whatsapp, try to free up as much as space you can by deleting extra files and extra apps and by transferring your gallery pics and movies. This would help.
    – FMF RBA
    Commented Dec 26, 2021 at 8:39
  • 4
    This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. To get notified when this question gets new answers, you can follow this question. Once you have enough reputation, you can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question. - From Review
    – mmmmmm
    Commented Dec 26, 2021 at 12:42

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