300 gigs of system data?!? HELP 🙏🏻

[Apple!Fre@k]

I have a 512GB iPhone 15 Pro. I’ve always had lots of free space. Recently my phone has started acting very slow and giving me storage full warnings. I checked and it’s showing nearly 300GB of System Data! How could this be? Even more confusing is when I deleted a 3GB app to immediately free some space, the System Data swelled by that amount almost instantaneously thereby occupying the space I just freed up. It didn’t even have time to download that 3GB over the internet so I don’t understand how that happened.

Is there ANYTHING I can do other than a full iPhone reset? I have tons of 2FA and other things on my phone and it’s a multi hour process to get all those set up again.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Apple!Fre@k]

I shut down my phone for 10 minutes. Started up and system data dropped to 74GB. Two minutes later it dropped to 11.3GB. Is my phone schizophrenic?

 

[Bichon]

Probably some system process got hosed that the phone reboot fixed, and now a garbage collection process is returning the storage space it was using. Fingers crossed that it doesn't recur.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Your total storage was full - Spotlight will stop indexing, so you can’t rely on any of the individual totals to be accurate. It’s important to keep a bare minimum of 5% of storage free, so about 25GB on your phone.