Date: 6/24/26 10:14 am From: Betsy Kane (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: Re: Merlin being giant data hog, but "data and documents" files not accessible - advice?
Thanks to everyone who responded to my question. If anyone is wondering, I
uninstalled Merlin and re-installed it. That freed up a massive amount of
storage. It was the consensus response too.
One of the many helpful people who responded wrote "Deleting packs and old
recordings should clear them entirely but I think there’s a bug where
sometimes it only removes it from the user interface but doesn’t clear the
data from the app itself, so a hard restart is needed."
That seems like it happened with my app. It's been years since I've been
able to retrieve a recording once made. I can only replay them if I am
still actively using the session when the recording was made (or if I think
to save them as an audio file outside of Merlin which can be done but which
I rarely do). After that, they become unavailable and don't load when I go
to My Sound Recordings. Apparently they may have been still in there,
just unseen, and there must have been hundreds, all using storage.
Anyway, issue resolved - Happy birding
Betsy Kane
Washington, N.C.
On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 10:09 PM Betsy Kane <oldurbanist...> wrote:
> Merlin is soaking up 200G of storage on my phone, of which most is "data
> and documents". Only a very small fraction is the app itself, per my
> phone's memory usage data.
>
> I go into Merlin to see my data and documents. Click on Sound Recordings
> -- nothing comes up. (This isn't new -- I haven't been able to access any
> sound recordings in Merlin in years)
>
> I would like to delete my "data and documents" for Merlin since I can't
> access them anyway and really need the 200G of storage for other things,
> like the operating system.
>
> This is on an iPhone.
>
> (I don't think it's a bunch of bird packs because I have already offloaded
> the ones I'm not using. Only the Southeast pack shows anyway)
>
> Appreciate any advice on how to shed 200 Gigs.
>
> Betsy Kane
> Washington, N.C.
>
