This has happened to me a bunch of times already, and I keep having to figure out what the problem is and how to fix, so I thought I’d write this to make it easier to find in the future.
What does it mean when your iPhone can no longer be backed up to your computer because of “Other”? What is “Other” and why does “Other” sometimes seem to take up five, ten, twenty or more gigabytes of space on your iPhone when you’re looking at it in iTunes?
In my experience, this happens because of a database corruption, which can sometimes be caused by disconnecting the iPhone’s cable from the computer while it is backing up or syncing. The corrupted database causes a file not to be recognized, which causes it to get duplicated, and it continues getting duplicated every time the iPhone is synced after that.
Most files are tiny, and so this shouldn’t be a major problem most of the time. But in my case, the files that got duplicated dozens and hundreds of times were voice memos, ranging in size from five megabytes to sixty megabytes apiece. These files are apparently considered “Other” instead of “Audio,” and that’s how “Other” grew in my case to take over my entire iPhone.
Here’s how to solve the problem:
- Download iExplorer; open it and connect your iPhone.
- In iExplorer, navigate to {your iPhone} > Media > Recordings.
- Identify the duplicated files. This can be a bit tricky, since the files are named numerically, and they’re also identified as duplicates numerically. The key is to see that duplicates get a 1, 2, 3, &c. added at the end of the original’s file name (pre-extension). For example, if there’s a file called “20090828 115904.m4a,” then “20090828 115904 1.m4a” would be its first duplicate, “20090828 115904 2.m4a” would be its second duplicate, “20090828 115904 3.m4a” would be its third duplicate, and so forth.
- Highlight all the duplicated files, being careful not to highlight any originals.
- Right-click and select Delete.
As long as you’re only deleting files with the m4a file extension, you can be sure that you won’t be destroying your iPhone and causing irreparable damage, so the worst case scenario is that you might delete some of your voice recordings that you actually intended to keep.