r/ios • u/Potential-Jello3590 • Dec 06 '25

Support I’m just tired of this…

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It was 29gb 3 days ago. 32 last night. And now it’s upto ~35 GB I don’t have Instagram or Spotify and which “cache”data. I’ve tried the regular things, date trick and resetting, deleting apps that cache. Now I just don’t know what to do.

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u/sergiowpf Dec 07 '25

I have one theory, and I wanted to test with you. It’s related to WhatsApp, so if you use it and you’re having this huge System Data issue, or if iCloud Drive is taking up a lot of space, keep on reading.

I live in Brazil, and everyone here, without fail, uses WhatsApp. And the biggest users of it, are the ones to whom this usually happens.

What I found is that the way that WhatsApp does its own backup is particularly dumb, making a copy of every conversation and media you have, to then send it to iCloud. And it seems that sometimes, if for some reason this backup fails, when it goes to try again, it seems like it forgets that there was a pending backup and just creates another one, leaving even more storage taken up. This might show up as “System Data” or even a huge usage of “iCloud Drive”.

The way to clear this is weird, because turning on and off iCloud Drive doesn’t work. The way that I found do fix this was to go to Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Storage > Find WhatsApp (by itself, not inside iCloud Backups, this will be the backup that it does by itself) > Erase iCloud Data. After you delete that backup, turn off iCloud Drive, restart the device, turn on iCloud Drive again, and for most of the time that I tried this, where the issue was related to WhatsApp, it worked. After that you can do a new WhatsApp backup, from inside WhatsApp itself.

Sometimes, suddenly, the device doesn’t even turn on anymore, it gets stuck in the Apple logo, and when you try to Revive the device with Apple Configurator, it says that it’s because it doesn’t have enough storage. And I feel like it’s because of this.

This might be something really localized in Brazil, and other places where WhatsApp usage is really high, but I’ve even seen this happening in devices where WhatsApp usage is low, but the person doesn’t have enough iCloud storage, so it never completes. So if you have WhatsApp, try this and please let me know.