My 64GB iPhone was so low on space it barely worked. Here’s how I saved it

With the launch of the iPhone 16e and 11th-gen iPad, Apple has officially phased out all devices with 64GB of storage in favor of 128GB as the entry-level option. That’s great for new buyers, but there are a lot of people who still have 64GB iPhones and iPads that are too new to replace. I know from experience: I own an iPhone 12 mini and a 6th-gen iPad mini, both otherwise great devices, and it’s become a headache to manage the latest versions of iOS with such a small amount of space.

If you also have a device with 64GB of storage and have been struggling with constant low storage alerts, I’m here to help. Here’s how I made my devices usable again without having to buy a new one.

iOS has a storage management problem

The ideal amount of storage varies from person to person. For people who mainly use their phone for messaging and browsing the web, the 64GB entry-level option was usually enough. But over the last several years, iOS itself as well as many apps have required much more space.

For example, if you only install Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube on your phone, you already end up taking up more than 1GB of storage before any caches or downloads. As for iOS itself, the latest version of the operating system takes up more than 10GB and possibly twice that with System Data. Given that you’ll probably want to download more than four apps onto your phone, filling up 64GB of storage doesn’t take long.

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While larger system and app sizes are inevitable as we get more advanced features, Apple is partly to blame for not optimizing how iOS and iCloud manage storage. In theory, iCloud automatically decides what to download to your device based on available space, but what happens most of the time is that iCloud tries to download all your files, even when you don’t need them. iMessage can also become a problem, as the system keeps a large cache of all your messages and attachments. (Speaking of Cache, read: How to clear cache on iPhone & iPad.)

All of that is to say, when an iPhone or iPad reaches its storage limit, the device becomes virtually unusable. Apps crash, the camera won’t launch, it becomes impossible to install system updates… the situation gets bad.

But things aren’t hopeless. If you’re dealing with an iPhone or iPad that has run out of available storage, here are a few things I do to make it usable again.

Remove unused apps

This might seem obvious, but the first step is to find out what exactly is taking up your iPhone’s storage. To do this, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. There you’ll see details of how much space each app is using, as well as the system.

If your device has reached the state of crashing due to a lack of free storage, you can start by removing some installed apps. Start by deleting apps you no longer use. You can sort the list by size or last used date, which will make it easy to see any seldom-used apps that are eating into your storage space.

If you can’t bring yourself to part with any of your apps, you can also temporarily remove an app from your device without deleting its data. To do this, tap on an app in the iPhone Storage settings and choose the “Offload App” option. This will delete the app itself by storing its data, documents, and settings. That way, when you reinstall the app, everything will be restored as if it were never deleted.

Also in the iPhone Storage settings, you may want to enable the option “Offload Unused Apps,” which will automatically remove apps that haven’t been used in a while, but without deleting any data.

Delete old iMessage chats

If you’re a heavy iMessage user, be aware that your conversations can take up a lot of space on your iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, even though iCloud backs up all your messages in the cloud, it also keeps them downloaded and eats up storage on your phone.

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Until Apple resolves this, we recommend deleting your old chats. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages and look for the option “Keep Messages.” You can set iMessage to automatically delete old messages after 30 days or 1 year, which will continuously free up your iPhone’s storage. However, just remember that changing this will also delete messages from your other Apple devices.

It’s an all-or-nothing scenario, however, and there’s no easy way to save individual conversations or back them up to an external drive, so if you want to keep any specific conversations, you’ll need to put in a little work. There are some third-party apps that could help, but for the most part, you need to save each attachment individually and screenshot conversations.

Change the iCloud Photos settings

Photos and videos are the biggest culprits when it comes to eating up storage space. Similar to iMessage, iCloud Photos also backs up your photos without removing them from your devices, and that can be a problem when you’ve only got 64GB of storage.

There are a couple of things you can do. Obviously, the first is to go through and delete old videos, screenshots, or duplicate photos from your camera roll. The Photos app has a tab under Utilities where you can easily find any duplicate photos and videos in your library—you may be surprised by how many you have.

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You can also head over Settings > Apps > Photos and check that the “Optimize iPhone Storage” option is on. This will allow your iPhone to remove some of the full-resolution photos from your device and only download them when you want to see them.

But in some cases, you may need an even more aggressive solution. On my devices, for example, I have more than 700GB of photos and videos in iCloud. So, even with optimized iPhone storage, there’s still a lot of data that ends up being downloaded to my phone.

If you’re in a similar boat, consider turning off iCloud Photos and removing all the photos and videos stored on your device. Instead, you can periodically transfer the photos you snap or save to your Mac or an external drive.

Worried about losing the photos on your iPhone? Read: How to delete photos from iPhone but not from iCloud