- One of the most frustrating issues
faced by every iPhone user
happens when their iPhone runs out of storage.
And then when they go to find out
what's taking up all their space,
they find it isn't photos or videos,
it's system data.
- Apple isn't specific about what this means,
so it can be difficult to know
how to track it down and delete it.
And unfortunately,
tech YouTubers are giving out a lot of bad advice.
- But not us.
We've done our homework.
We're gonna tell you what Apple won't
about what's really in system data
and show you how to clear it out for good.
- Right now, system data is taking up 8.54 gigabytes
of my iPhone storage space.
This video is a challenge.
Let's see how low we can get this number.
- Your number might be a lot higher than David's.
And the higher it is,
the more you can save by going through these steps.
- Our first step is to clear history
and website data on Safari.
Clear out those caches.
Open up the Settings app, scroll down and tap on Safari.
Then scroll down and tap Clear History and Website Data.
Then tap Clear History and Data.
- If you see the option here
to keep your tabs or close your tabs,
close your tabs.
- Let's tap Close Tabs.
I'm also gonna do this on Chrome on my iPhone.
I use Chrome sometimes to get around the paywalls
'cause I don't wanna give a website my email address
or pay, you know, 9.99 for a subscription.
So let's open up the Chrome app.
Tap on the three dots
in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
Scroll down and tap Clear Browsing Data.
And then tap Clear Browsing Data at the very bottom.
And now how about I just tap Clear Browsing Data
one more time.
- Let's head back to the Settings app
and see how much we've cleared out now.
- And I'm down to 7.45 gigabytes already.
So that's already a full gigabyte of storage space saved.
- That's awesome.
Next we're gonna clear another cache on your iPhone.
The App Store cache.
I'll close out of Settings.
Pull open the App Store.
And how do we clear the App Store cache?
- Well, you can tap on any icon
at the bottom of the screen 10 times.
- [David] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
- Like, a lot of developer options on your iPhone,
which we'll get to later,
this triggers a process in the background
that clears the cache.
There's no popup.
- That's unfortunate,
but your App Store cache has been cleared.
Next up, an important Messages setting
that can impact your system data usage.
- Let's head back to the Settings app
and tap back to the main page of Settings.
Scroll down and tap on Messages.
Then scroll down and tap on Keep Messages,
and set this to 30 days.
- But make sure you save
all those cute puppy pictures your mom sent you
before you go changing this setting or you might lose them.
- Yeah, you will lose them.
'Cause when I tap 30 days,
it'll delete my older messages permanently.
Let's just tap Delete.
Let's do it for the video.
- Those are the big ones you see
in every single video on this subject,
but we found a whole lot more.
- Like clearing your reading goals in the Books app.
Let's tap back to the main page of Settings.
Scroll down and tap on Books.
And then scroll down and tap on Clear Reading Goals Data.
Tap Clear Reading Goals Data.
- Who wants to read anyway?
Come on. - Not me.
Get a real book.
- Get a book. - Physical.
- eBook.
Next up, deleting saved voices in Accessibility
can clear out some system data, too.
- Especially if you're like me.
And when you first get your iPhone,
you're listening to all the voices
and seeing what they sound like
and you forget to go back and delete those voices.
- Well, why would you have to
when you first- - Yeah, well,
it takes up some of the system data storage.
- That's why.
- So let's tap back to the main page of Settings.
We're gonna scroll up and tap on Accessibility,
then tap on Spoken Content,
then tap on Voices.
I'll tap in English.
And, for example, I have Agnes here using 1.6 megabytes.
It's not a ton, but if you downloaded a bunch of voices,
it can add up pretty quickly.
Swipe right to left, and then tap Delete.
- This isn't a video
for people who only want broad strokes, David.
This is the people who wanna get in there
and clear this out.
We're showing you how.
- Yep, make sure to do that
for all the voices you no longer need on your iPhone.
- And make sure to give this video a thumbs up
if you're enjoying it so far.
Next up, we'll talk about deleting large mail attachments.
- Yeah, so let's talk about the Mail app on our iPhones.
Then tap the Filter button
in the lower left-hand corner of the screen
and then tap Filtered by.
Make sure to select Only Mail with Attachments.
And here you'll see all of your emails with attachments.
You might want to go in and start deleting some of those
because they can take up system data.
- Next up, dictionaries.
Turning off too many dictionaries isn't a good idea
if you use the Translate app on your iPhone,
but it can clear up system data.
- Let's head back to the main page of the Settings app.
We've got a long way to go here.
Then we're gonna tap on General,
then scroll down and tap on Dictionary.
So right now I've got five dictionaries.
But the Spanish dictionary, do I really need that
if I'm not translating to Spanish on my iPhone?
- No.
- We can just uncheck the Spanish dictionary.
And there you go.
- Clearing out some system data.
- The Apple Dictionary might be important
'cause it has words like AirPods in them,
if you want those to show up like they would.
- Oh, interesting. - And spelled correctly.
You might want to hold onto that.
Let's tap back to General,
upper left-hand corner of the screen,
then tap on Language & Region.
So right now Spanish is one of my preferred languages.
I don't think so.
Swipe right to left and then tap Delete.
Note that your iPhone will restart after you do this.
Next up, the Siri & Search section of Settings
where we're going to delete some history.
- [David] Let's tap back to the main page of Settings.
Tap on Siri & Search.
Tap on Siri & Dictation History.
And then tap Delete Siri & Dictation History.
There it goes.
- Back to Settings, General.
Let's talk about some fonts.
- Yep, let's tap back.
Tap on General,
then tap on Fonts.
Right now I have Filmotype Lucky installed on my iPhone.
I don't need that.
- No, you can get rid of that, David.
- Let's swipe right to left and then tap Remove.
And now it says I have no fonts installed on my iPhone.
- We removed fonts,
but what about the saved significant locations
on your iPhone?
- [David] Let's tap back to General
and back to the main page of Settings.
Then tap on Privacy & Security.
Tap Location Services
and scroll all the way down to System Services.
Tap on that,
then scroll down and tap on Significant Locations.
If this switch is on, turn it off.
- This will also save some battery life for you.
And next up, we're gonna talk about the App Privacy Report.
- Tap back to the main page of Settings.
Tap on Privacy & Security.
Then scroll down and tap on App Privacy Report.
If this is on, you got a whole bunch of data in here.
Look how ridiculous Facebook's network activity is.
Nuts.
- Crazy. - Crazy.
But we can scroll all the way down
and turn off the App Privacy Report.
Any existing information on app activity
will be immediately deleted.
That's how you're freeing up some system data.
Tap Okay.
The App Privacy Report,
it kind got hyped up a little bit,
and maybe we also hyped it up a little bit, too,
but it's been kind of disappointing.
There's really not much you can do with it.
- Yeah, unless you know what all the domains mean
and do a lot of research,
you're not really gonna... - Yes.
- And you can't even change.
It's not like you can change anything.
- Right.
Surprise, Facebook is doing a lot.
- It's the right thing to do.
- Next up, let's close out your apps.
- To do that, we need to open up the App Switcher.
If your iPhone has a Home button,
double press that Home button.
If your iPhone does not have a Home button,
swipe up from the very bottom of the screen
to the center of the screen to open the App Switcher.
Swipe these up and off the screen.
Free up some RAM.
- Next up, update your phone.
- In the Settings app, scroll down, tap General,
tap Software Update.
And if an update's available, tap Download and Install.
- IOS 16.2 added some really cool new features
that we talked about during our last live stream.
You should join us at our next one.
Hit the Subscribe button and tap that notifications bell
to find out right when we go live.
- Next, sync your iPhone to your computer.
- I did this yesterday and saved a whole gigabyte.
- Well, let's get out our lightning cable here,
plug this into the phone,
and we'll open up Finder.
Click on David's iPhone.
Click Sync in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
And there we go.
We're synced.
- We're about to go really deep,
but before we do, you should restart your iPhone.
That can also clear up system data.
- If you have an iPhone without Face ID,
just press and hold the power button,
swipe slide to power off.
If your iPhone does have Face ID,
it's the side button
and either volume button simultaneously,
swipe slide to power off.
Your iPhone will shut down.
This is especially important
if you haven't restarted your iPhone in a while.
While David's phone turns back on,
let's talk a little bit about system data.
System data is necessary.
And Apple doesn't talk a lot about things like RAM,
but iPhones have RAM.
For instance, the iPhone 14 Pro has six gigabytes of RAM.
- When your iPhone's RAM fills up,
it makes room by moving the data to virtual memory,
which is part of system data.
- And if your iPhone didn't use virtual memory
and didn't use system data,
your iPhone would freeze every time it ran out of RAM.
- Let's enable Developer Mode on this iPhone.
- Simple.
I'll open Xcode on my computer
and then I'm gonna go to the top where it says Window
and open Devices and Simulators.
And unfortunately, David's phone isn't here yet,
so we're gonna hook it up to my computer
to enable Developer Mode.
- All right, there we go. - All right.
- And there's your cable.
- "Allow accessory to connect?"
I will tap Allow on my end
and choose not to use Google Drive.
Now I can tap on David's iPhone over here.
And you need to go to Settings,
scroll down to Privacy,
and then scroll all the way to the bottom to Developer Mode.
Tap on that, and then turn on the switch.
And we're gonna restart, ladies and gentlemen.
Now the Developer Mode is on,
there's some cool settings we can check out.
- [David] Well, let's open up the Settings app.
Scroll down,
and one below TV Provider,
you'll see Developer with the little hammer icon.
Tap on that.
We have four things we need to do.
What's the first one?
- Fast App Termination.
It's crazy, but it works for the purposes of this video.
Every time you close an app, it doesn't just minimize.
It wipes it out of the memory.
- Yeah, so if you scroll down,
Fast App Termination, turn that switch on.
- And then we have a few caches that we can clear in here.
The first one is Clear Experience Cache.
Let's tap on that.
And, again, just like the App Store cache, no popup.
It's happening in the background.
Next up, Reset Local Data on Next Launch.
- [David] Yeah, so if I scroll down here,
we've got a switch here.
Let's turn that on.
- Next time David opens the News app,
it's gonna clear that cache.
And the last one, in this section at least,
is Reindex All Items with Identifiers
under the spotlight section.
- Yeah, let's scroll down.
Reindex All Items with Identifiers.
Tap on that.
And, again, no popup, but it did happen.
- You're right.
So let's head back to iPhone Storage.
- We are at 4.07 gigabytes of system data.
Now that we've gone deep, let's come back down to Earth
and talk about how to clear specific app caches.
- Not every app has a function
that allows you to delete that app's specific cache.
There is a foolproof way to delete any app's cache,
and that's to delete it and reinstall it again.
But fortunately, Twitter is an app
where you can just do it from the Settings menu.
Let's open the Twitter app on my iPhone.
Tap on your account icon,
upper left-hand corner of the screen,
tap on Settings and Support,
and then tap Settings and privacy.
Then scroll down
and tap on Accessibility, display, and languages.
Then tap Data usage.
Then tap Media storage, and tap Clear media storage.
Clear media storage.
That's been cleared, but wait.
We also have web storage.
Tap on that.
Tap Clear all web storage.
- Just know that other apps
might have different names for this.
This is called media storage, web storage.
Other apps might be local storage or even temporary files.
Look for those buzzwords when you're trying to clear cache.
- Yep, sometimes clearing the app's cache
won't clear system data,
but it will clear some storage space within that app.
I did this on Twitter the other day and saved 600 megabytes.
- Holy geez.
- Yeah, it was a lot.
- And if all those fails, restore your iPhone.
- This is something you might have to do,
especially if system data is taking up a ton of gigabytes.
I've seen some phones with like 75 gigabytes of system data.
This is where the restore would be a good fit.
- Definitely.
And before you do, make sure you have a backup in iCloud.
- [David] Let's close out of Twitter,
go back into the Settings app,
tap on your name at the top of the screen,
then tap iCloud,
tap iCloud Backup,
and tap Back Up Now.
- There are some other tech YouTubers out there
who are telling people not to restore from iCloud backups
because system data will come right back with it.
Well, according to Apple, that's completely wrong,
along with a lot of the other steps they tell you to do.
- Also, if you erase all content and settings
on your iPhone without an iCloud backup,
you need to go back in and reinstall
every single one of your apps.
It's just not a good solution for this problem.
And restoring your iPhone every week, it's not good.
- It's not a solution.
To restore an iPhone, you'll hook it up to your computer.
If you're running Windows or an older Mac,
you'll use iTunes.
If you have a newer Mac, like mine, you'll use Finder.
Then you can just tap Restore iPhone,
and it'll go through and be like a brand new iPhone
when it's done.
- Yeah, we got a guide in the description section
of this video.
Now if you're sitting there
and you're saying, "I can't backup to iCloud,
I don't have enough iCloud storage space,"
what do you know?
We have a new video, "How to Free Up iCloud Storage Space."
Watch that next.