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mnni

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 23, 2013
41
65
My wife's iphone 6s needs repair and the temporary 5s has only 32 gigs of storage. I cannot restore the WhatsApp media because after downloading the backup (probably 8.03GB) it appears WhatsApp tries to unzip the backup files.

Now the local storage consumed is separated into: 8.03 GB in my iCloud drive local storage (the WhatsApp backup file downloaded). 2-3 gigs of apps and data. Another around 10 GB of "other" storage (the most annoying of them all) and 10GB of free space. There is virtually nothing on the phone except the WhatsApp backup download, "other" **** and free space. But WhatsApp failes in providing the images and videos reporting I shall free 5-6GB more space.

Unless I find a way to purge this other stuff the only options I seem to have:

  1. Skip media restore. But with the next daily backup will probably then destroy the WhatsApp media backup in iCloud. Loosing the images and videos in the message thread. Or is there a way to prevent this?
  2. Don't do anything and wait for the repaired phone. Restore with enough storage from the old backup. Get all media back but loose that week of chat.
Am I missing something?

As a sidenote I also deleted the entire photo library as they are stored on iCloud perfectly well. I had 3 GB of local iCloud photo library data. After deleting that the storage freed but the "other"-storage raised by 3GB. The same with the iCloud drive: disabled the drive; the 8GB freed and "other"-storage raised by 8GB. I tried rebooting but the other storage stayed the same. I doesn't seem to get any more free space no matter what I do.

Any ideas? Thank you!
 
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