Shrinking phone storage

My daughter has just bought a 32GB iPhone 5s. On syncing music files with iTunes on her MacBook Air (just music files) there is now 8.2GB of ‘Other’ on her iPhone. We now notice that there is 26GB of ‘Other’ on the Air. How can we reduce these sizes? Tony Furniss If your daughter’s phone doesn’t have room for any more apps or music – that’s when you start looking for ways to free up some storage. But if it’s just something that you would never have noticed was a problem unless iTunes told you about it, then it’s best just to ignore it.

Having said that, 26GB is a very large number. There are three main ways for Other to grow: legitimate temporary storage from apps, misappropriated storage due to bugs in apps, and legitimate storage that gets misclassified as Other due to a corrupted sync. With 26GB of Other, I would strongly suspect the last category. Cleaning apps don’t do nearly as much as they claim to do and a full factory reset is overkill, too. An ordinary backup and restore should be enough to fix this.