For a while a lot of us couldn’t figure out why Apple had started doing this on devices a few years ago. One of my friends who has worked for Apple in the past said that after they went fulL SSD in their laptop range, there started doing what they did on iPhone which is use the SSD as a “swap” cache. On HDD, you could reserve a small section of the drive as a virtual RAM bin where you could put parts of RAM if it got full so it could swap out. Kinda lik rapidly changing costumes in a play.I have no idea what you just said, but..... my "system data" would fill up rather quickly even after a restore and no apps or movies downloaded. I was obsessing about it for quite awhile....but I have retreated as my storage is currently not a concern because I find no apps worth downloading yet
With an HDD, this is costly as the disk has to spin. With an SSD, there is no bottleneck and you can technically treat your SSD as RAM.
Essentially, System Data is just a bland phrase for “Program Closed Save State”. When you close an app, it‘s state at close is frozen, or backed up. But how does it multitask and update in the background? The System Data is just a universal name for all these program State saves. When you close an app And reopen it to find it exactly as you left it, the OS has to cache this….where? System Data. You won’t try to delete that file or cache in ignorance To “save space”. Gaming consoles do this so you can go back to the system menu while the game is “frozen”. I can close my app/game, go to the Home Screen, check downloads, browse the store, send messages to friends, all while my app/game “hangs“ frozen in the background, in the System Data cache…...
To reduce it, go to Settings, General, then Background App Refresh. Disable a few apps and notice the size decrease over a few hours or days. They won’t run in the background, but you’ll get back a few gigs.
Last edited:
