Reminders app taking massive amount of space

Question

Why does the Reminders app have 471 MB of “Documents & Data” on my phone?

First of all, I’ve only ever created text reminders. There’s no reason that it should’ve ever used that much space for some plain text.

I cleared all of the completed reminders. When that made no difference I literally deleted every single reminder and list. As you can see, there are no reminders remaining.

So why does it still take 471 MB of space that I can’t get rid of? I uninstalled it and then restarted my phone and it still takes up the same amount of space.

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Update: I disabled Reminders from syncing via iCloud, and the amount of Documents and Data increased! Now it's 507 MB!

Answer 1

I was able to improve it. I found this long thread on Apple support which suggested that "cleared" reminders are merely hidden and not fully deleted.

1. Enabled Reminders on iCloud again and reinstalled the app on my phone.
2. On my Mac, went to ~/Library/Reminders/ and found that there was an sqlite file that was taking 500 MB of space, the same size that the iPhone was reporting.
3. First I tried opening the sqlite database in a GUI and truncating all of the tables. However for some reason the file size remained the same.
4. So finally I just deleted the sqlite database entirely, since I don't care about preserving its contents. If you do care about preserving your reminders then good luck and probably try a better app.
5. I toggled Reminders off and back on in my iPhone iCloud settings.
6. Now the Reminders "Documents & Data" is finally down to 70 MB. Still not perfect but a lot more acceptable.

It still seems like some bug must have caused it to take so much data in the first place. Probably a repeating reminder that created more duplicates than it should have.