The auspiciously-titled Safari hogging up storage on your iPhone? Here's the fix! exhorts users to tap Settings → Safari → Advanced → Website Data → Remove All Website Data (mgmiller68 wonders in the comments how this differs from Settings → Safari → Clear History and Website Data); alas, neither method proved efficacious.
Others advise waiting days for the issue to clear; sadly, not even weeks availed.
Still others recommend a draconian backup, wipe, and restore approach.
Macworld's Documents & Data: A mysterious black hole of data storage in iOS concludes unpropitiously:
"At a minimum, I’d like to know what’s taking up all that space. Those 7GB of Documents & Data probably include something that’s gotten stuck, that can’t be deleted, such as an old iOS update perhaps. But it would be helpful if every app had to offer a feature to delete its caches, or if there were a global Clear Caches feature in iOS."
Found the offending files by jailbreaking and SSHing into the device then:
#cd /var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/#find . -name Safari./{GUID}/Library/Safari #cd {GUID}#du -h... 4.0G ./tmp/Download-tCA2Caas ... 3.7G ./tmp/Download-UT0Nlzkj ... 7.8G ./tmp 8.0G .
Emptying the tmp directory did the trick:
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H/T jareehD for the filepath hint.
/misc | Sep 26, 2020