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According to iTunes, on my iPhone 6 I have 6 Gb Photos, 2 Gb Apps, 1,4 Gb Documents & Data and 1,6 Gb of Other. I have no idea what Other is and what makes 1,4 Gb of Documents.

screenshot of iTunes

I want to free as much space as possible without deleting photos and apps. If I backup my iPhone using iTunes, make a factory reset and then restore the backup, will Documents / Other be completely restored too or will I gain free space?

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    The only thing that may be done by doing that is clearing cache data. Everything else will be restored.
    – JBis
    May 23, 2018 at 14:13
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    And the caches will be regenerated afterwards over time.
    – Matt Sephton
    May 23, 2018 at 22:46
  • What does General > iPhone Storage showoas Recommendations for feeding up space?
    – Matt Sephton
    May 23, 2018 at 22:49

3 Answers 3

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Your suggested backup/restore process will only provide a temporary respite. Caches will be cleared, but they will regenerate.

In iOS 11 Settings > General > iPhone Storage will give you recommendations as to how you can free up some space.

You can offload apps (delete the app but leave it's data, settings and icon) and you can store your photos in iCloud.

You can process your photos using something like JPEGmini or Half.app and regain some space.

But really you're fighting a losing battle. I recommend you upgrade to a larger capacity iPhone so you don't have to waste time and energy on keeping things just below capacity.

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    I understand that I'm losing this battle. This phone was given me by my company and unfortunately I didn't have a choice regarding storage space. I shoot a lot of photos and therefore I would have never bought such a lowspace device by myself. My goal now is to win a couple of months before I receive another device (luckily there are no more iPhones with 16 Gb!). I would have reduced the photos size but it seems to be impossible to load them back on the iPhone without iCloud, it seems now that the time to start using it has come.
    – Bob
    May 24, 2018 at 8:27
  • @matt-sephton yes that's where I found out about clearing cookies I think.
    – cmarangu
    May 24, 2018 at 15:00
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This answer may not be very helpful as I cannot give you a definitive Yes or No, but my guess is no. After a google search I found this, and since at least voice memos probably get synced to itunes, I assume there is other stuff in the 'Other' category which gets synced as well.

I once needed storage on my old iPhone 4S though, and clearing cookies helped. Be careful what cookies you clear though, some could be documents you worked on or something. Most of them, however, are just keys your browser and the website remember so you can tell the website them and you don't have to type in your password every time (not the same thing as saved passwords in browser) in other words they're when you close the window and reopen the webpage you'll still be logged on. Article on how to clear cookies by apple here.

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  • Other is things like iTunes Genius, Safari Reading List.
    – Matt Sephton
    May 23, 2018 at 22:44
  • It's better to include the relevant parts of the link here because links can go stale making the answer useless. Please edit your answer with the relevant details from the link.
    – Allan
    May 24, 2018 at 1:47
  • Akkan what do you mean, make the hyperlinks have better discriptions than 'this' and 'here?' or do you mean some other thing
    – cmarangu
    May 24, 2018 at 14:59
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A tip that has worked for me several times was to rent a (very large) movie in the iTunes store directly on the phone. Your phone will try to make as much room as possible for the movie, but if the movie is really large, this will still not be enough. So the rental will fail and you have a lot of free space.

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  • Yes, I used to use this trick. But now this doesn't help a lot any more. 200 Mb maybe on best days.
    – Bob
    May 24, 2018 at 13:23

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