The "other" category seems to be the mystery box of chocolates - no idea what is in there... It could be mail for you -some people forget about that... I have looked on many sites - MacRumors, Apple, etc, and there are many suggestions on how to get rid of that huge "other" that so many people have, and I have had essentially no success, like so many people. Restoring sometimes supposedly helps... It may be that something like iExplorer will let you look at all the files on your device, and see if you can figure out if there are large files that may be tied to something you know about - or it could have thousands of little tiny things that one has no idea what they are used for, or how to get rid of them. Sorry to not be of help, I have the same frustration, and am posting to a)empathize, b)let folks know this is common, and c)hope that maybe someone will have the ultimate answer of a definite way to fix this... My 64Gb iPad has 10 Gb of "other" and I can only account for maybe 1 Gb of it (mail) - the rest - I have no idea...
49 GB of apps. Wow. Check your itunes, I bet that OTHER category is gonna be massive! OTHER category are game saves, cache and any other files and folders your apps create. Some apps create their own storage folder as well. Like photo editing apps, video apps or download managers. If you don't save any of those files directly to your phone, they have their own folder or a cache folder where they are stored. I remember I had a download manager to download songs. And despite iTunes saying I had no music on my device, the download manager was taking up 2GB of space with the songs I had downloaded. Check this: Connect your device to iTunes. Click on it. Check the OTHER category and see how much you have. It might be time to delete some cache. Also, click on the APPS tab at the top of iTunes and it will list what apps are saving additional information into your phone. In that screenshot, that app is saving some PDFs. That all adds to storage space. Same goes for image editing software. Same goes for Pages, Numbers and any other app. The files they save will be added to the Other category. What pluto6 says is true. OTHER could be anything. There is an incredible amount of variables.
Bite the bullet? What is a downside of manually restoring your data? And how exactly do you hard reboot?
For me..just wasted time. You can start the manual restore right before bed and after you wake up it should be done. If you're doing it on an iPhone, during the period it's installing iOS, you pretty much don't have a phone. From time to time you hear of horror stories of people losing data when syncing with iTunes..but generally it's safe to do a restore. I usually do a hard reboot of my iDevices once every 2-3 weeks if I notice the devices slowing down too much or if there's more battery drain than usual, even after multitask closing all apps.
Well guys, I'd like to thank you all. My dilemma is officially over. I hard reset it and now I got all the apps I'm actually going to play. Thanks to everyone again! You guys all get free pats on your backs .
