Storage space reporting incorrectly?

[macDonalds]

I have a 16GB iPhone 6 Plus with iOS 9.0.1 on it. My phone currently reports ~150MB of free space and I've always had this feeling that it was incorrect. I don't have a lot of apps and I store my photos/music in the cloud. I have even reviewed the storage space and nothing is taking up over a gig.

This morning I decided to plug my iPhone into my Macbook Pro and check out iTunes. Lo and behold - iTunes reports that my iPhone has 4.45GB of free space. Now that makes more sense to me.

Is this a known bug? Is there any way I can get my iPhone to see the extra space that is free?

 

[gsmornot]

I have a 16GB iPhone 6 Plus with iOS 9.0.1 on it. My phone currently reports ~150MB of free space and I've always had this feeling that it was incorrect. I don't have a lot of apps and I store my photos/music in the cloud. I have even reviewed the storage space and nothing is taking up over a gig.

This morning I decided to plug my iPhone into my Macbook Pro and check out iTunes. Lo and behold - iTunes reports that my iPhone has 4.45GB of free space. Now that makes more sense to me.

Is this a known bug? Is there any way I can get my iPhone to see the extra space that is free?

There could be a difference in music and photo storage space usage. Photos will stay on your device in their full resolution until you need the space if you have opened or created them recently. Music will store on your device as well until the space is needed. It could be that your device is holding files that if needed will reduce in size or go away to make room for other items. iTunes could be reporting space based on what it knows about the real space available. Not sure this is specifically your issue but it could be an option. One way to test this I guess would be to install an app that is larger than 150MB and see what it does. Word and/or Excel are big enough for a test.

 

[KALLT]

Music is definitely not always correctly reported. In Settings > General > Storage > Music it does not mention cached music, or other local music data, only the tracks that you saved for offline use. I’ve also experienced a glitch in iCloud Music Library that results in offline music going missing from the Music storage item, whereas it is taken into account in overal storage usage. I did a restore from backup a few weeks ago and suddenly I recovered almost 2 GB of space.

 

[Ed217]

I am seeing the same thing on two devices - an iPhone 4S and an iPad Mini. Each are 16GB units and show effectively zero space left. However the sum total of the items shown in the space used display add up to something closer to 4 GB or so. In the 4S case, all the cloud options for photos were turned off, yet the space incorrect value continued.

What I did to fix this was to do an iTunes save, then full restore from iTunes. When the dust settled, all the missing space re-appeared.

Sure seems like a bug to me.