How Apple Nearly Ruined My Vacation
I recently went on vacation to Costa Rica. It was an experience that was not without technical difficulties. The very first time I attempted to take a picture with my iPhone, I received a message that my storage was completely used up and that I needed to delete something in order to save photographs. It happened at an inopportune moment. My wife and I were in the jungle surrounded by white-faced monkeys. One had climbed on her shoulders, and she was imploring me to take photographs. The message on my phone came as quite a shock because I'm very careful about keeping track of my available storage, and as far as I knew, I had over 100 gigabytes free. My first thought was that I had inadvertently filmed a 4K video of the inside of my pocket lasting for hours. But that proved not to be true.
I didn't have time to investigate the issue, being in the middle of a rainforest and all, so I did the first thing that I could think of, which was to delete a couple of the largest apps on my phone. They were both AI models that I had downloaded, and it would be no problem to download them again in the future. With the immediate problem solved, the emergency was over, but I had six more days of adventure planned. I wanted my visits to the beautiful places I wanted to see captured with photographs and videos, and I was concerned about the storage issue. When we returned to our hotel, I began to look into where all my space had gone.
It turned out that Apple's mysterious System Data had swollen to 75 gigabytes. Normally, it's somewhere in the range of 20. A web search revealed that System Data "includes caches, logs, temporary files, failed downloads, Spotlight indexes, Siri voices, iMessage attachments, data, and sometimes straight-up orphaned files that iOS forgot how to delete. When something goes sideways (updates, app crashes, big syncs, travel, poor connectivity), it can balloon fast."
After restarting my phone, which should always, without exception, be the first step in troubleshooting just about any device, I freed up more space by
- deleting more large apps
- deleting all local copies of my iCloud photos
- offloading unused apps, which the operating system will redownload when I need them, except that only works if I have connectivity, so I better not need one of them on a camping trip or anywhere without a good connection.
These steps just involved removing data to free up space, and what I was most interested in was shrinking the size of my System Data to what it should be. The Internet suggested that I:
- Check message storage, but it was only a little over 3GB
- Clear Safari history and website data
- Check for stuck updates
- Toggle all iCloud syncs
- Toggle Siri and dictation data by turning them off, restarting the phone, and then turning them back on
- Delete and reinstall large apps, including all the offline maps I had carefully downloaded for Central America
- Check all streaming media apps for music, podcasts, movies, audiobooks, and television shows
After attempting all these steps, one after another, and seeing little or no changes, I kept seeing the same thing mentioned again and again in my research. The surefire and bulletproof method to freeing up space is the nuclear option. I was to ensure that my phone was backed up to iCloud. Then I was to erase all content and settings, download the backup, and restore it. Being in a foreign country, there was no way in hell I was going to do anything that might brick my phone, even temporarily, because I needed it to be my lifeline back to my life in the States. It held my boarding passes, all of my contact information, and my medical history. So wiping it was out of the question. I managed to capture the photographs that I wanted, although I abstained from making any video files. I checked on my storage daily, but it never budged more than a gigabyte or two in either direction, holding steady at around 75 gigabytes of System Data day after day.
When I returned home, I went ahead and used the nuclear option, and just as everyone had promised, more than 50 gigabytes of System Data disappeared, and my storage was back in the range I was used to seeing it.
For people without a technical background, my near disaster would have been an actual disaster. The steps I took seem common sense, but little in the average person's background prepares them to do almost any of the things I tried. Power users forget that we are the outliers.
Travel causes a surge in System Data for lots of reasons because iOS is designed to start caching and logging like crazy when you begin to go in and out of airplane mode, switch cellular networks, and encounter frequent areas of poor connectivity. It stores authentication tokens, carrier codings, DNS results, captive-portal junk, and diagnostic data.
Apple Maps and every single app that you have using Apple's location services stores offline maps, routing data, and geofencing information for places you've recently been. All of that information is in System Data. All the new apps you download for a trip, the extra messages, photos, and videos you take, coupled with spotty connectivity, result in the retention of more local copies of data. Even things you delete have space-eating residue that lives, you guessed it, in System Data.
You may have never noticed this issue on your past travels when you were using older versions of iOS. Some of the data retention behavior was just introduced in recent editions. Given enough time, the data retention policies and internal maintenance cycles will eventually shrink System Data, but Apple doesn't give you any knobs to turn to make that happen.
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