This is my personal week of Apple issues. After my MacBook Pro depleting its battery (I still keep it connected to power for the time being), my iPhone was notifying me that I am running out of storage (only about 10 GB free space).
I checked the iPhone’s storage. It is a 256 GB iPhone. I had been using about 100 GB with Apps, Music, and Photos. So, what was going on? 34.84 GB is iOS (half of it being Apple Intelligence) and then there were about 100 GB being used by “System Data”.
Yes, I am aware that I have installed iOS 27 on September 14th and that there is this nice caching and Siri and AI thing going on. 
I get that. But not after almost 2 weeks. Sorry. My iPads are fine. Both of them show System Data of about 10 GB. So, Apple needs about 30 to 50 GB of space on our iOS/iPadOS devices under ideal circumstances. Up to 20 GB being Apple Intelligence, no matter if you can even use it or not…
After doing some research on the web, I ended up with several articles and Reddit posts pointing out that this is an ongoing issue related to logs, failed OS downloads, caches, and what not. Ongoing for years.
It is recommended to:
- clear Safari’s cache and history (which almost did not do anything)
- check Messages (I do not really use iMessage, unfortunately, it still is not much of a thing over here, not my issue)
- check Apps on the iPhone to see how much storage they take and if something looks weird (no)
- Check if there is an iOS update that has not been deleted after installation; if so, delete it (not my issue)
- Set the iPhone’s date 2 years into the future and let it sit with this date for several minutes (which brought back 30 GB) in order to get rid of logs and caches…
Nothing did help? Well, then it is time to back up, erase, and restore the iPhone… Which I did after waiting a day after the steps mentioned above (and apparently this is what Apple Geniuses are doing in cases like this). Not funny.
So, how much free space do I have now? 145 GB (which may be a temporary achievement). iOS is taking 16.26 GB, Apple Intelligence 13.1 (so far) and System Data is 10.37 GB now.
It just works…
Have a nice weekend, everybody!
If somebody wants to read more about this saga: