The iPhone Trick That Frees Up Gigs of Storage Without Having to Delete Anything

It's weird, but it works - by Andrew Daniels

There’s nothing more annoying than seeing the dreaded “Not Enough Available Storage” message pop up on your iPhone when you try to take a photo or download an app

Actually, the only bigger pain in the ass is constantly having to delete old photos and apps to free up precious space.

Luckily, some genius on Reddit recently discovered a mind-blowing trick that will open up a ton more storage on your phone. And you don’t have to delete anything.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to Settings > General > About to see how much available storage you have.

You’ll see in the screenshot that we have 1.3 gigabytes (GB) of free space.

2. Next, go to the iTunes Store and search for the HD version of the 1956 movie War and Peace. (Just trust us.) Click the “$3.99 RENT” option.

If you have less than 8.86 GB of storage left—the amount this flick takes up on your phone—you won’t be able to rent the movie. So you’ll see this message:

(This will work with other movies that are large in file size. The longer, the better—like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

3. Exit out of the error message and wait around 20 seconds. Now go back to Settings > General > About and check your free storage.

You’ll see we just gained 500 megabytes (MB) of extra storage.

4. Now repeat steps #2 and #3 again.

We’re now up to 2.2 GB. Crazy, right? We repeated this trick three times and increased our storage all the way up to 3.6 GB.

Keep repeating to clear as much space as you can, but stop right before you have enough space to download the movie. (Unless you actually want to watch it.)

Why does this work? When you try to download a large file, your iPhone will clear the caches and cookies hanging out in the background that you don’t need anymore.

This article was originally published on MensHealth.com