What is the Other Data on iPhone, and How to Remove It?

If you connect your iPhone to iTunes, you will find that there’s mysterious “Other” data exists. Have you ever wondered what is the “Other” data on iPhone, and how to remove it to free up your iPhone space? In this article, we will find out.

Updated Jul 21,2016 | by Niko

Storage is already one of the big concerns of iPhone users, especially for those who use 16GB iPhone. If you connect your iPhone to iTunes, you will find that there’s mysterious “Other” data exists, and it always occupies lots of space. Have you ever wondered what is the “Other” data on iPhone, and how to remove it to clean up iPhone space? In this article, we will find out.

What is the “Other” Data on iPhone

In fact, the “Other” data is everything that does not fit into iTunes’s pre-existing categories, such as your iPhone settings, old system files, browser caches, cookies, voice memos, app documents & data and etc. And therefore, iTunes will not manage the “Other” data for you, but you enable to manage and remove it on your iPhone directly.

How to Remove the “Other” Data

Since the “Other” data consists of multiple components, so you need to remove it from your iPhone separately.

Clear Safari Cache and Data

Go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data. In this way, you will clear all the browsing data of Safari quickly and completely. Besides, you can also remove data those visited websites store on your iPhone to free up storage, go to Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data > Remove All Website Data.

Delete Email Accounts and Re-Add Them

Most iPhone users add multiple email accounts on iPhone, and use them to send and receive emails every day. Actually, delete and re-add your email accounts will remove the messages and attachments from your local email cache. Do not worry, the data is still available online.

Go to Settings > Mail > Accounts, and open email accounts one by one, and choose “Delete Account”.

Remove App Data Manually

Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage, and you will see how much space each app is using. However, iPhone does not allow you to remove the App Documents & Data from your iPhone. To remove the data, you can open the app, look for the setting and clear its offline cache. Or uninstall and reinstall the app directly, and this way will remove the data.

Disable iCloud Drive

iCloud space is different from iPhone space. Even your iCloud account has enough space for storing data and information, the cached information will still occupy your iPhone space. Just in case you forget to remove the cached information, we suggest you disable iCloud Drive. Go to Settings > iCloud > iCloud Drive, and turn it off.

Reset Your iPhone

If you do not want to clear the data step by step, you can erase all the settings and content on your iPhone directly. Before doing it, you need to backup your iPhone, so that you restore it from your backup. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.