Syncing Gone Awry. Pile of "Other" Space on iPhone

By: Kelly Heffner Wilkerson
January 09, 2015 at 05:15 PM

In my continuing exploration of rampant iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch "Other" disk space, today we're looking at an issue where a failed sync dumps music, photos, or other synced files into the abyss of "Other" space.

After a failed sync of photos, videos, music, ringtones, books, or tv shows failed to sync, some (or a lot) of the synced items are allocated to the orange "Other" space rather than showing up properly as music or photos.

I've seen people fix this error in the following ways:

Disable the syncing of the category that failed, to remove all of those files, then re-enable it.
Take a backup, wipe the device, then restore from the backup. I'd really like to get a solution posted here using option one rather than this one, since this is a heavy-handed approach.

We'd love to hear about people's experience with large "other" space, so we can try to come up with some easy fixes.

After the failed sync, are you able to see the content on the device even though it's categorized as other? (For example, are the photos that did transfer showing up in the photo albums?)
Does disabling and re-enabling syncing fix things for you?
For photos, does removing the iPod Photo Cache folder help you?

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