For a couple weeks now at least, my iPhone has been reporting “Zero KB” free space. At first I thought I’d just filled the sucker up, but then after removing a few unused apps, some old Strong Bad Email podcasts, and a few albums, and still seeing “Zero KB”, I realized something was amiss. For a moment after deleting each of those things, I did see some free space return, but then after changing “tabs” in iTunes (or whatever they call them), it reverted back to nothing.
I googled and found a few blogs saying you could fix this by copying a bunch of mp3s to the phone and then deleting them. I was able to copy about 50mb of stuff to it, but after deleting them, the space vanished as before. It seems to get gobbled up by that secret orange “Other” category. I tried deleting the “trash” in my email, clearing the cache in Safari, but nothing helped.
So I am now doing a restore, and hoping for the best… I’ll update when it’s finished.
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Well, it finished. And I have plenty of free space left… 14.3GB! It seems to have reset everything back to the default, only leaving the “original” iPhone apps on their respective “pages”… My email accounts seem to be fine, at least. I’m now trying to re-sync all the other apps I had on there, then I’ll worry about all the music and photos, etc… Yikes. Restore, my ass!
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So, that process completed, and now I seem to have all my applications back on the phone, though they are all over the place. I’ll have to put them back where they should go by hand, I guess. It did copy my podcasts back. Still have 13.79GB of free space, but I also don’t have any music or synced photos. I’m gonna have to copy all the music back by hand. This sucks. The camera roll is there, at least. I’m also noticing now that “other” category is showing 227.8MB of usage. What is that stuff?
I’m still not convinced that this will have done any good in solving the original problem. Gotta love it.
Relevent lesson learned? Take screen shots of all your app pages before doing anything stupid like this.
