iPhone "Other" storage continuously expanding - help

[hamstarz]

So here's my problem - earlier today my iphone gave me the low on space warning. I thought that was odd, because I thought I still had a few hundred MBs free, butI looked and it said 0 kb free. Anyway, I then went and deleted a few hundred MB of music. It freed up space for a minute or two. Then it gave the low on space warning again. I looked again. It was once again at 0 kb.

I sync it with iTunes. iTunes shows 1+ gigs of "other" storage. I followed some advice online - deleted all my music, went to itunes_control/music using DiskAid and deleted all the folders there. Ended up with about 5 Gigs free.

This space begins immediately shrinking.On iTunes, I can literally look every few seconds and see the "other" storage go up and the free space go down. Now my "other" storage has ballooned to about 4 gigs. I assume it'll keep rising until my iPhone is once again at 0 kb free.

I've had my iPhone for about half a year and it has never done this - just today out of the blue. I am running 3.1.2. Is there any way to fix this without resorting to a restore?

 

[cobra302]

a restore is the only way that i know of to get rid of that much. i usually have as much as 500mb of other, but it seems like after a few syncs, it goes away. it has never affected my free space though.

 

[hamstarz]

I have my iphone disconnected from my computer right now. I can go into settings every minute or two and see the free storage space drop, when I am not doing a single thing with my iphone. I have no idea what's happening or how to make it stop, but I'd like to figure something out. I'd really like to save the hassle of restoring, but I guess I'll do that if there are no other solutions.

 

[cobra302]

hmm, you're not jailbroken are you? sounds like something has gone rogue on you. i think you might be better off with the restore.

 

[flyingember]

restore it.

 

[gleep52]

I just ran into this problem myself and decided I didn't want to do a restore and set everything back up without a huge fight. I have fixed mine, so here's the short story...

I hopped onto WinSCP and started looking through tons of folders, then thought back to my command line days and decided to create a search to do the work for me... I opened a console session from within WinSCP and typed in this command:

find / -size +10000 -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -nr | more

I realize that the "more" value doesn't seem to work with WinSCP, but at least it buffered the entire returned results and I was able to find the top returned value in the list - which was my rockapp log file - it was eating up every bit of free space I had... I deleted this 3+GB file and replugged my iPhone into iTunes - now I have 3GB free... yay!

If you run the above command, you will need to run it from the root of the device if you wish to scan everywhere... so when you start your Console session type in "cd \" and press return... This takes you to the root of your device. Then type in the find command listed above. It will give you the "host not communicating" error - mine took about 3 minutes or so... just be patient, it's searching every file on your iDevice which has thousands of files on it (even if you don't have any music). Finally it will dump a list (probably a huge list) of files - the top few being the main concern. The most likely candidates are any .log files that show up... as they are probably growing unlike applications which shouldn't.

The find command shows you the path and file name the culprit is, so you can browse to it with WinSCP or iFile and delete it...

I take no responsibility to any problems that your phone has... do this at your own risk! Just be sure not to delete any critical file... and there shouldn't be any repercussions to this action.

I hope this helps someone else!!