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[Q] storage problem/free space -- what is taking up so much??

So starting off with this phone I know it doesn't have the best internal storage. When apps are moved to the SD some of the app stays behind on the internal storage, I know that. I have had 2 shifts. My first one i dropped, cracked the screen, and the insurance gave me a new one. On my first shift at the time I had about 70mb of free space left when I sent it in. Before sending it I made a titanium backup and restored that on my shift I have today. When I restored it I had about 120mb of free space. (NOT THE PROBLEM READ ON)
So the point is something in the system is causing massive storage to fill up over time, and its not apps. I have force moved apps and that only helps a little. Is it a certin cache that I can clear? please help!
At the moment I have 60mb of free storage, that is with the app cache cleared through App2SD

Right I have the following : System ROM 219MB , Internal 222MB , SD Card 8.32 GB . When you long press on an app in TB it should give you the option to move to SD card. You shouldn't have to force move an app. When you restored all your apps did you restore apps and data? Or just the app? Also after restoring with TB you need to make sure the app was restored to the correct place. There's an option I usually check in the preferances before I restore all my apps. It restores to the previous location you had the app. Hope that helps.

I restored the apps and data... This isn't a problem with tb, its a problem with some storage/cache something building up in the system
No I'm not using Tapatalk... I'm using the XDA Premium app, cause I got balls.

My email took up a lot of storage on my old hero because everytime I deleted something it still stayed on a new folder called imap/trash... it was taking up about 50mb so you might want to look into that
Sent from my PG06100 using XDA Premium App

In your sd card or internal? There was a folder on my sd called .trashes and it had everything I had deleted on my sd. Where exactly is it located? Ill look in root explorer.
No I'm not using Tapatalk... I'm using the XDA Premium app, cause I got balls.

Don't know if your restoring SMS with something. But if your are sometimes that takes up hella space. Did a phone that had over 25MB of SMS messages restore back onto it on internal mem.

i will see, i also use a tool called disk usage. you have probubly heard of it but it maps out everything and the amount of space it takes up. you can narrow the results to a certin cache or whatever. ive seen that apps like pandora are taking up space in the dalvik cache. Its only like a mb or 2 but still. do you know anything about apps storing things in the dalvik?
what is the dalvik even for anyway?

I've been trying to go back to stock today, so I've wiped a few times, but I've got 430MB total space internal, with 366MB free

and.....
i dont understand what this has to do with this thread

im.nick.hello said:
i will see, i also use a tool called disk usage. you have probubly heard of it but it maps out everything and the amount of space it takes up. you can narrow the results to a certin cache or whatever. ive seen that apps like pandora are taking up space in the dalvik cache. Its only like a mb or 2 but still. do you know anything about apps storing things in the dalvik?
what is the dalvik even for anyway?
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I beleive dalvik cache gets recreated everytime you reboot. But, about Pandora is it on the SD Card? Or internal mem? I listen to a TON of music. When I had Pandora on internal it was up to 12MB .So I moved it to the SD card, only 536KB on internal now.

My app is on the SD but it is storing over 1mb on internal
If you have DiskUsage go to the [root required] section and press 'App Storage'
if you can find pandora you will see that most of it is stored in the dalvik cache

Sorry I don't use DiskUsage app. Your right about how much is on internal. Mine reads 1.28MB.

any idea what it is storing there?

Drawing a blank on this, I'll keep looking. See if I can come up with something. But I'd probably head on over to theMikMik and see if somebody there can help.

My biggest space hog when I had problems was email... Try clearing data for email or gmail to see what happens (maybe back up first)
Sent from my PG06100 using XDA App

Mail or gmail app..
I have both, a aim on the mail app and my gmail on the gmail app
No I'm not using Tapatalk... I'm using the XDA Premium app, cause I got balls.

i cleared my cache partition, not sure what was stored there but it doesnt matter cleared up 20mb... is there any other ways i can get more space??? why are apps storing data in the dalvik??

Any other suggestions here? My wife's Shift is having this problem. Constant notification about low storage space. Can't even download any new apps. I have not rooted her phone yet, and not sure if I will; I don't want to have her have to go without for any length of time, and I don't think she wants things changed around so much as she just wants the thing to work, not to have to tinker or troubleshoot.

Captain Spectacular said:
Any other suggestions here? My wife's Shift is having this problem. Constant notification about low storage space. Can't even download any new apps. I have not rooted her phone yet, and not sure if I will; I don't want to have her have to go without for any length of time, and I don't think she wants things changed around so much as she just wants the thing to work, not to have to tinker or troubleshoot.
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Did you download a lot of apps? Try moving the apps to the SD Card. The path is Menu-Settings-Applications-Manage applications-Downloaded. Then just click on the applications one at a time. If the button says Move to SD card, and isn't greyed out press it. That should free up some space. If that doesn't work since your not rooted, I would just try a factory reset.

clear the folder /data/tombstones. App crashes and such create rather large files that can eat up quite a bit of space. Also check the cache folder at the root, failed market installs will have file fragments in there as well.

Not enough memory, delete some item? ?

So my sister has her phone when she does anything this message comes up she getting very pissed off any way on solving this ? she has space and she has a sd card ... whats the deal.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda premium

xxjrsmith3xx said:
So my sister has her phone when she does anything this message comes up she getting very pissed off any way on solving this ? she has space and she has a sd card ... whats the deal.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda premium
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The deal is that we only have 2GB of internal storage, which is where the camera defaults to. This can be filled very easy if one likes to take lots of pictures. There are a lot of ways around this, but the easiest for a non techie is to download a 3rd party camera app and set the storage to the external card. You could also swap mount points or try to symlink it as well.

dispozable said:
The deal is that we only have 2GB of internal storage, which is where the camera defaults to. This can be filled very easy if one likes to take lots of pictures. There are a lot of ways around this, but the easiest for a non techie is to download a 3rd party camera app and set the storage to the external card. You could also swap mount points or try to symlink it as well.
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I have a hard time understanding this, too. Settings>Storage tells me that I have only about 60 MB free in "USB Storage." It also tells me that I have 93 MB of "Pictures, Videos" there. The trouble is, I have no pictures or videos in USB storage. It's all on the external SD card. The camera saves to the external SD card, and all my music, photos, and videos are there, not in internal storage. It even tells me I have 3.4 GB of "Miscellaneous files" in USB storage, which is impossible. That 3.4 GB is actually what's on the external SD at the moment. It tells me that over 1 GB of apps are stored there, even though the apps actually there come to far less---maybe there's app data that's adding to the total.
The only time it becomes a problem is when I run NewsRob, which invariably tells me it doesn't have enough memory to work.

ubizmo said:
I have a hard time understanding this, too. Settings>Storage tells me that I have only about 60 MB free in "USB Storage." It also tells me that I have 93 MB of "Pictures, Videos" there. The trouble is, I have no pictures or videos in USB storage. It's all on the external SD card. The camera saves to the external SD card, and all my music, photos, and videos are there, not in internal storage. It even tells me I have 3.4 GB of "Miscellaneous files" in USB storage, which is impossible. That 3.4 GB is actually what's on the external SD at the moment. It tells me that over 1 GB of apps are stored there, even though the apps actually there come to far less---maybe there's app data that's adding to the total.
The only time it becomes a problem is when I run NewsRob, which invariably tells me it doesn't have enough memory to work.
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For pics and such, use Google drive, drop box or sky drive. Mine is set to upload over WiFi only. After my pics are up, I delete them from gallery. Also, make sure all music is on external sd . Then go to settings/storage erase SD card. This should clean up any uneccesary files or clutter. Last, move all possible apps to SD and clear all caches. FYI , if on any cm 10 variants don't clear the caches to fast or the phone will freeze for 20-40 secs. That is all

jbats said:
For pics and such, use Google drive, drop box or sky drive. Mine is set to upload over WiFi only. After my pics are up, I delete them from gallery. Also, make sure all music is on external sd . Then go to settings/storage erase SD card. This should clean up any uneccesary files or clutter. Last, move all possible apps to SD and clear all caches. FYI , if on any cm 10 variants don't clear the caches to fast or the phone will freeze for 20-40 secs. That is all
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Well, I made an interesting discovery last night. I found that, even though I had set the PodKicker app to store podcasts on the external SD card, it had somehow reverted to internal USB memory, and had dumped a bunch of large files in there.
I also found that my Kindle app had deposited a bunch of files in internal USB memory. There's no way to tell Kindle to put them on the external card, but I supposedly only had a few books residing there. An examination of the kindle cache, however, disclosed almost two hundred, taking up a big chunk of memory. I deleted the whole directory, started Kindle, and let it re-download the few that I need. I think somewhere along the line I had to re-register the Kindle app, and it just left a bunch of old files there that it couldn't use anymore.
Between these two purges I freed up about 150 MB of internal USB storage.

150mb isn't much and will be eaten quickly.
a lot of apps install to the internal but load a bunch more on the external.
Camera ICS + is a good camera replacement that can save directly to the external SD.
Also, run ES File Explorer and use it's SD card analysis to see what is taking up space. I know that if you have your google photos synced, even just the thumbnails database file will be up to 1gb.
Move any Titanium or CWM backups to the external SD, but make sure you remember where they are when you go around deleting things.
I also found a trash can folder that was huge so I'm pretty sure that the internal SD card isn't fully freeing up memory when you delete things.
Also go to your App Manager and see which things are taking up a lot of space. I know that Google+, Gmail, Chrome, Facebook, Grooveshark and a few others take up a lot of space.

[Q] One X Phone Storage question

Okay so this phone has an internal memory that is split into internal storage (2GB) and phone storage (10GBs). I've been going through the memory and trying to clear it out because it always seems full. After freeing up some space it says I have 1.43GBs being used on my phone storage for all my apps, music (which is really just a couple of podcasts consisting of 550MBs), and my gallery only 90 photos. This leaves only 1.6GB free out of 10 on that partition? Where is all this missing space? I completely cleared the app cache and like I said there is no video or music of any kind. I figured the OS was part of the internal storage as well so what could be taking up the other storage?

I forgot exactly how its split up, and I think whether your are ICS, JB or AOSP it gets displayed a bit differently. But I think its 2 GB for apps, 4 GB for the OS, and 10 GB is user accessible storage (basically an SD card, just internal or "virtual"). I don't think the OS takes any of the 10 GB of user accessible storage ("phone storage").
Are you rooted/bootloader unlocked, and have TWRP backups or Titanium Backup data, because both of those take up lots of space on the SD (phone storage).
Do you have any apps, like games, that may have had additional content data downloaded after you started up the app the first time? These can often take up a lot of space on the SD (phone storage) as well. You will often see them in folders specially named after the app or the software company (such as Gameloft). This data is obviously needed to play the game or run the app.
Also take a look and see if you have a LOST.DIR folder. Sometimes corrupted files will get dumped in here, and never deleted until you do it manually. I think I found a couple hundred MB worth of files in here once. Unless you know you have corrupted files that you want to recover (like photos you took), this data is safe to delete.

Also use es file explorer. Go menu -> manager -> sd card analyst it will tell you where your storage is being used
Sent from my VENOMized HoxL

area51avenger said:
Also use es file explorer. Go menu -> manager -> sd card analyst it will tell you where your storage is being used
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Great tip. Thanks. I love ES File Explorer, and its my go-to file browser app for the time being. But I don't think I ever knew that feature existed.

Google Play Music and storage space?

So, lately, I've been running out of storage space on my phone. Thing is, when I go into Settings > Apps, and sort by size, there's only two things that seem to be taking up the biggest chunk of my space (though it still doesn't quite add up, so I'm puzzled by where all my storage space has went, but that's another issue), one of which is a game, the other is Play Music.
Now, I do keep my music on device via the app, but I set it to my external micro SD card, so it shouldn't be on my phone. Yet, in my settings, Play Music shows it's using up nearly two gigs of storage space. I'm confused as to why this is. Is it showing how much it's using on my micro SD card? If not, why is it taking up two gigs of data on my phone? How do I free up that space, without deleting the downloaded music on my micro SD card? All the options in the Play Music app make it sound like it would delete the music I've downloaded, which is, again, on my micro SD card, and I don't want to delete that.

Hi, I'm not sure.. but maybe the storage location in "settings" does apply only to explicitly downloaded music, and not to "cached" music.
You could try to clear the cached songs (from settings) and then disable the "cache during playback" setting, and see if the problem remains.

cc_rock said:
Hi, I'm not sure.. but maybe the storage location in "settings" does apply only to explicitly downloaded music, and not to "cached" music.
You could try to clear the cached songs (from settings) and then disable the "cache during playback" setting, and see if the problem remains.
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I thought about that, the only thing is, in Settings > Apps > Play Music, the cache only shows as 208KB. Data shows as 1.80GB. I sort of want to hit Clear Data, but I'm worried that will delete all the songs I downloaded on my external storage, because I don't know what else this 1.80GB would be considered.

What I mean is to clean the cached songs from the app itself.. In settings, "downloading" section, "clear cache".
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[Q] Insufficient storage

My Nexus S (GT-I9020)keeps giving me an "insufficient storage" message. Particularly when updating "Google Newstand".
So I have cleared out lots of Photos and music and stuff. Cleared caches. Moved stuff to SD etc. Still keeps happening.
So while connected to my PC by USB, I ran "Treesize" on it, and it tells me that I have 9.87Gb free. What is the problem?
Of the few Gigabytes that are used, by far the biggest folder is called "DCIM", I know that this is where pictures are stored, but I have cleared out loads of photos. The largest file in there is called " thumbdata", at 966Mb by far the largest file on the entire phone. What is this waste of space? Can I delete it?
It seems that whenever I take a pic. with my phone, it is stored there, then a little while later a second copy appears thanks to Google upload or something, but the new copy is not as high res as the original. I do want Google to upload my photos back to my PC, but why does it have to send them back to the phone? How do I stop this? I spend too much time deleting copies of pics that are already on the phone in original. I think that the thumbnails folder is a result of all this.
The biggest memory hog after DCIM is Clockwork Mod, within it a folder called "blobs". What is it and can I delete it?
The Next biggest memory hog is called "TWRP". What is it? Can I delete it?
Is there a guide to what all these things mean and do, for us learners?

monkey shoulder said:
My Nexus S (GT-I9020)keeps giving me an "insufficient storage" message. Particularly when updating "Google Newstand".
So I have cleared out lots of Photos and music and stuff. Cleared caches. Moved stuff to SD etc. Still keeps happening.
So while connected to my PC by USB, I ran "Treesize" on it, and it tells me that I have 9.87Gb free. What is the problem?
Of the few Gigabytes that are used, by far the biggest folder is called "DCIM", I know that this is where pictures are stored, but I have cleared out loads of photos. The largest file in there is called " thumbdata", at 966Mb by far the largest file on the entire phone. What is this waste of space? Can I delete it?
It seems that whenever I take a pic. with my phone, it is stored there, then a little while later a second copy appears thanks to Google upload or something, but the new copy is not as high res as the original. I do want Google to upload my photos back to my PC, but why does it have to send them back to the phone? How do I stop this? I spend too much time deleting copies of pics that are already on the phone in original. I think that the thumbnails folder is a result of all this.
The biggest memory hog after DCIM is Clockwork Mod, within it a folder called "blobs". What is it and can I delete it?
The Next biggest memory hog is called "TWRP". What is it? Can I delete it?
Is there a guide to what all these things mean and do, for us learners?
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how many apps in your device? u can check your remaining storage at setting>apps>downloaded...if the remaining is under 100mb...u need to delete some apps to update some apps...

Re:insufficient storage
cshnz said:
how many apps in your device? u can check your remaining storage at setting>apps>downloaded...if the remaining is under 100mb...u need to delete some apps to update some apps...
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I have 51 countable icons for apps, 102 in the list of "All apps." which includes all sorts of android stuff.
Under "downloaded" (36 apps) internal storage shows 784Mb used, 224Mb free.
Under USB it shows 3.4Gb used, 9.9Gb free. Aha! so that's what Treesize is looking at.
I get it, my 1Gb of internal storage is being used up. I will try and move more apps to USB.
Is that it?

also check your system partition, google apps often go there, if you're not rooted you wont be able to free space on it, the system partition is about 500MB large so it gets easily filled up, it contains your android rom and system apps
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

monkey shoulder said:
I have 51 countable icons for apps, 102 in the list of "All apps." which includes all sorts of android stuff.
Under "downloaded" (36 apps) internal storage shows 784Mb used, 224Mb free.
Under USB it shows 3.4Gb used, 9.9Gb free. Aha! so that's what Treesize is looking at.
I get it, my 1Gb of internal storage is being used up. I will try and move more apps to USB.
Is that it?
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Click to collapse
yes i think you must move some apps to sd, or delete it.... hope it will work