The other day, Mathieu’s 16 GB phone suddenly had no space. Even after rebooting, even after reformatting (and not restoring from backup), all his spare bytes were being sucked into a black hole.

He had no songs, few apps, a modest number of photos, and under a gigabyte of space available, making him unable to compile, load, and tests his apps.

Each time he deleted one of his apps, the space would mysteriously fill up within a few minutes, adding to the ever increasing “other” bar in iTunes:

This delete-then-lose-space behavior made me think that iCloud was trying to store files locally on his phone to reduce cloud access. I suggested that he disable iCloud and sync just the bare essentials like contacts, calendars, and notes. (Mathieu has a paid 300GB iCloud plan.) Sure enough once he logged out and rebooted, over 7GB of space was freed up and he was able to use his phone again.

I’m not super-familiar with iCloud so if anyone can further explain how this works, and how to set up the phone to limit it from glomming space, I’d sure appreciate being able to pass that along. Thanks!