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iPhone Anyone figured out the system storage too-high problem?

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macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2008
11
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iPhone SE 16GB, latest iOS.
Been having this problem for well over a year now. Never have space. Out of "16GB", 11.5GB are currently taken by "system storage". Been reading about the topic here and in different forums and articles and videos every few weeks, tried few suggestions:

- Syncing with iTunes shows more free space on iTunes, but actually within the device it's still the same

- Hard restart isn't working at all

- Completely deleting the content of the iPhone and restoring from iCloud/computer backup also works only in the short term, and very quickly it builds up again.

I offload and reinstall 3-5 apps a day on average, exactly when I need to take pictures there's no space for the camera, and when I want to order Uber I have to offload some other apps so I can reinstall the Uber app, to name a few examples. This is ridiculous.

Did anyone figure something that actually works in solving this?
 
I have noticed similar issues on a new iPad, it looks like some apps are not having their data deleted correctly. Being a bit OCD about this sort of thing I carefully watch my storage space. I noticed that when I download a video on Netflix then delete the file after watching, the space moves from being taken by Netflix to being taken by system but all trace of the video vanishes other than the space taken. Other apps which download lots of data do not show this behaviour and the space is freed after deleting files.
 
"System" is mostly deleted data. It becomes a problem when the storage area (blocks) are partially used by data that isn't deleted (pages) and it has no where to go because the NAND storage is full or near full.

Data is read and written in pages, there are many pages in a block. However data is deleted as blocks. Also solid state storage can not be overwritten, it has to first be deleted and than written too. This is why a full SSD is slow, a single write command could make the SSD have dozen of write and delete commands as it combined multiple pages from different blocks to a single block so those blocks that data came from can be deleted for the new data you want written.

A house keeping process referred to as TRIM mitigates the slow down by preemptively doing the above process prior to the space being needed by the user. However this is an power intensive process that will gimp the storages ability to read and write until its done. I believe an iTunes sync will manually initiate the process but only to a certain extent because once its full it won't be able to do it.

A desktop computer OS has the same issues and same TRIM process with the exception being there is over provisioning built into the SSD. This just storage space hidden from the user so the SSD can continue to function.

With excessive "system" storage use try deleting small files too, like music and messages. Some of the time doing this will allow space in blocks to open up for iOS to move used pages together and allow blocks to be deleted but don't expect the world. For example I just deleted an album off my iPhone and system when from 3.09 to 3.01.

My suggestion is to set everything up with iCloud (Notes, Contacts, Photos, etc etc etc). Restore as NEW but log into your iCloud so you have everything except your apps. Download your apps as you need them but keep 15% of the storage (2.4gb in your case) free at all times. If you exceed that amount then its possible for deleted data to just move to storage but not have a way to actually be deleted and in that case you just need a phone with more storage.

Good luck.
 
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