Over time, everything ends up taking up space. This is easily demonstrated with iPhone photos and videos, but also ends up being true with seemingly discrete data such as our health data that iOS encrypts and stores on iPhones.
I checked myself recently, and it turns out that my health data is over 1.2 GB on my iPhone. It’s an amount of information that I can store without problem (I have more than 64 GB free on my phone), but which will inevitably continue to grow. Let’s see what we can do to clean up this space when needed.
Over the years it all adds up
If you’ve had an iPhone for years, give it a try: Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. In the list of apps sorted by how much storage space they take up, look for “Health”:
If we touch on this section, we can see the occupied space classified by types of health data:
What can we do to clean this data? There is a section in the Health app that helps us. If you open it you will see that in the main section of ‘Summary’ you have the button ‘View all health data‘:
There you’ll find a breakdown of all the data types, and within each one you can enter to locate these two options later:
With them, you can view all data entries individually or grouped by sources (devices or apps). In the first case, you can delete the data by clicking on ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete all’:
In the second case, you can do exactly the same thing, but selecting a data source. You can find data from old devices that is not difficult for you to delete:
The deletion of health data involves reduce the accuracy of trends that the Health app is able to calculate based on that data, so keep that in mind if you want to avoid that as much as possible.
Perhaps over the years, Apple has provided users with a way to delete this data more selectively and comfortably. An option like being able to keep the last two or five years would not be bad, eliminating the oldest data thus preventing it from accumulating too much.
