How To Delete Documents And Data On Iphone

Delete Documents and Data on iPhone

If you have noticed your iPhone is low on storage space, or perhaps you are just browsing your storage settings, you might discover that certain apps have a large "Documents & Data" storage footprint and inordinately large storage burden in iOS.

We'll cover what Documents & Data actually are, and also how to delete the Documents & Data found on an iPhone or iPad.

Note this is not really intended to be a guide to free up general space, and if you simply want quick ways to free up storage space in iOS go here instead. This is aimed specifically at conquering the mysterious "Documents & Data" that can be found relating to specific apps on iPhone and iPad. It's a bit more advanced, and if you have never heard of Documents and Data, then you probably won't need this article let alone find it useful.

What are Documents & Data on iPhone and iPad?

There are two types of "Documents & Data" stored on iPhone and iPad, both of which can take up space on a device. One is usually app specific caches and other related app data, and the other is iCloud related files for an app. The fact they share the same name but have different functions, and are references in different sections of iOS Settings, is a little confusing, but they are different.

The "Documents & Data" associated with an iOS app include things like caches, app data, preferences, login details, and assorted other app-specific information. Most of this data is expendable and in many situations for many apps that have large Documents & Data storage consumption, the data tends to be very heavy on caches. This is typically the type of Documents and Data on an iPhone or iPad that users want to remove to free up some space.

Separately, the "Documents and Data" associated with iCloud are typically files and documents associated with the app itself, but stored in iCloud. These are the same type of files you might see in browsing iCloud Drive, and these Documents and Data are

How to Delete Documents & Data on iPhone, iPad

The simplest way to delete Documents & Data on an iPhone or iPad is by removing the app and then re-downloading it again. That may not make a lot of sense, but for the time being Apple offers no method in iOS to manually delete caches and app data, so instead if you want to delete that app data, you have to delete the app entirely.

Keep in mind that when you delete an app, and then re-download it, you will likely lose whatever data, logins, and other saved details from that app. Do not do this if you don't have login information saved elsewhere, and do not delete an app or its documents and data caches if you have important data stored within that app. You should back up your iOS device before beginning so that you can restore in the event you mess something up.

Open the "Settings" app in iOS
Go to "General" and then go to "Storage & iCloud Usage"
Go to "Manage Storage" under the 'Storage' section
Find the application(s) that have the 'Documents & Data' you want to delete (for example, Twitter is a 64MB app but can often take up several hundred MB with its Documents and Data), then tap on that app and choose "Delete App"

documents-data-iphone-before

Now go to the "App Store" and search for and re-download the app you just deleted
After the app has finished re-downloading, if you return to the same Storage screen you will find it now consumes much less space because the documents and data has been cleared out

(keep in mind that deleting and redownloading an app also will update it to the latest version available, so don't do this if you want to keep using an older version of an iOS app)

documents-data-iphone-after

Once you have re-downloaded the app, that apps Documents & Data burden should be just about nothing, though as you use the app it will slowly accumulate more documents, caches, and data again. In the case of an app like Twitter or Instagram, much of the documents and data are simply caches from pictures and videos, and thus are usually not really critical to the apps functionality in any way, they just take up space. Many other iOS apps behave the same way, which is fine until you start running out of storage space, and since iOS offers no way other to directly take care of this rather than deleting and redownloading the app, it can be annoying.

If this sounds familiar, it's probably because this is actually one of the main ways you can go about removing "Other" data storage from an iPhone or iPad (aside from restoring the device completely, which works best), and some users will go so far as delete all of their apps and then redownload them all again if many are found to be taking up large amounts of Documents & Data storage.

How to Delete Documents and Data from iCloud in iOS

The other type of Documents and Data is stored in iCloud, and it's the type of Documents & Data that users can directly delete without having to remove the entire app first. With iCloud Documents and Data, the storage burden isn't really on the device itself, it's in iCloud, so most users won't need to manually delete Documents & Data from iCloud and apps storing that data there. Nonetheless, here is how you can delete Documents and Data from iCloud in iOS:

Open the "Settings" app in iOS
Go to "General" and then go to "Storage & iCloud Usage"
Look under the 'iCloud' section and choose "Manage Storage" (be sure you go to iCloud otherwise you'll end up in the installed app listing we covered earlier)
Scroll down until you see "Documents & Data" section, then tap on the app you want to remove the Documents & Data from

Documents and Data storage in iCloud on iOS

Choose "Edit" then "Delete" or swipe left and choose "Delete" on the iCloud documents and data you want to remove from the specific app

Delete Documents and Data on iCloud iOS

Leave Settings when finished

The way Documents and Data is handled with iCloud Storage is certainly preferable to the impossible to manually delete caches that show up in native iOS apps, since it offers more user control over what to delete and what to keep. Hopefully this same ability will come to the app specific local device storage Documents & Data types found on iPhone and iPad.

Why can users not manually delete Documents & Data from iOS apps?

That's a good question, hopefully a future version of iOS will offer a manual option to delete app caches and app data. Many Android apps have such a feature, and a manual cache removal option would be very welcome in the iOS world where Documents & Data and the "Other" storage routinely balloons out and is nearly impossible to reclaim without a significant amount of effort and often a device restore.

Is there really no way to get iOS to delete local storage Documents & Data without removing the app first?

Generally speaking, that is correct. However, you can use a few possible workarounds to force iOS to run it's app "Cleaning…" process. One method that I have been using for years is to use a third party camera app to force iPhone Camera to take pictures even when there is no storage available, which tends to work for quite a while (where it finds storage space in who knows what ether is a big mystery) before you'll get an error message about storage space which then triggers the "Cleaning" app name in iOS maintenance process. Very quirky, very much a workaround, and no, not at all user intuitive, and not really recommended. But anecdotally, it can work. Another trick that works in the same way is to attempt to download a huge movie from iTunes (for example, Lord of the Rings in HD) that clearly won't fit onto the iPhone or iPad, which will also trigger the same app clean up process after or during the failure downloading the enormous movie.

Know of another method to delete documents and data from an iPhone or iPad? Have some other insight to Documents & Data in iOS? Let us know in the comments!