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Can't free up space on my device, no matter what I do

S

simpler

Member
Android always tells me that my device is almost full. NOTHING I do frees up more than about 20MB.

I've tried clearing the cache. Almost no space is cleared.

Sometimes an app moves back from external storage to internal storage, and when that happens I can at least move it to the SD card. But that hasn't been happening lately. The movable apps with a lot of data stay on the SD card. That may be a good thing in itself but it means there's nothing to move.

Smart Manager doesn't seem to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an SD card. It presents a list of apps, but the only option it offers, other than doing nothing, is deleting the app. And when I select an app from the list, as tho I were going to delete it, (No So) Smart Manager says the amount of space I'm going to free up is 0.0B.

Deleting photos? That's not an option. If you delete photos on the device, they disappear from Photos and Drive, even tho Photos is on the SD card. Free up space on Photos? Photos won't do it unless the photos are backed up. Backup and sync? The backup never completes.

Delete music files? The files are on the SD card; delete them and I might risk losing my music.

Move documents to SD card? There's not much that's movable that is on the internal drive.

Delete videos? I have none.

Download an app to help me with the job? I can't download an update, much less a whole app.

What to do?
 
Hi, just a suggestion, but if you have all important stuff backed up on the SD card, photos, music, etc; remove the card and do a factory reset, you can install the SD card after and tell the programs where to look for them. Phil
 
philayl said:
Hi, just a suggestion, but if you have all important stuff backed up on the SD card, photos, music, etc; remove the card and do a factory reset, you can install the SD card after and tell the programs where to look for them. Phil
Click to expand...

Before you do that... (which is a good idea), remove the card and copy ALL of the information from the card to somewhere else...

(If your card is encrypted, or is formatted as internal storage, which is an option on some phones, you won't be able to read it after you've done a factory reset)
 
I know I need to back up my phone (and my SD card if that's a different thing), but I have had TERRIBLE experience with backing up my phone in the past. With MyBackup Pro, the backup stops at a certain point from which you can't continue, so you have to start all over again until it stops, and then you have to start all over again, and so ad infinitum.

Any solutions to this problem? Remember I cannot download any more third-party apps.

Also remember that:

1. The problem is on the internal drive, not the SD card which has 100GB and is miles away from being full, and

2. I have lots of important unremovable apps, and plenty of important data on unremovable apps, i.e. bookmarks on preinstalled browsers. Even if I could move my bookmarks to the SD card without first installing a third-party app, Smart Manager would not recognize the move. For (Not So) Smart Manager there are only two options: no action or delete.

How about Amazon Prime? I joined Prime through a slip of the thumb. Is Prime's photo storage like that of Google Photos or Drive, i.e. dependent on the photo's presence on your device?
 
You could copy your photos to the SD card. That way you have a copy if anything happens to the synced one (and if you want to be safe you then copy them from SD to somewhere else).

Backups without additional apps will be tricky. I don't know what you have installed, but I'd suggest letting Google to a cloud backup of your app data (Samsung too if they still do such). For a local backup you can do it via ADB, but few people use that. You can export copies of contacts if you don't trust the cloud and copy those elsewhere for safety.

I've never joined Prime (better thumb control?), so can't say on that.

Unremovable apps live in the /system partition, so they don't use your space, but their data and any updates to them do. So if there are any you don't need you could try disabling them (which should remove both updates and their data, freeing some space). Uninstalling updates to others would save some space (provided you don't allow them to update again), but it's possible for data from a newer version not to be backward-compatible with the older one (unusual but possible) so I'd be more wary here.
 
When I had to switch out my S5, I backed up my contacts, launcher, and several other apps from the app itself. They generated a backup file, which I stored on the MSD card.

For your space issue, move all your photos, music and documents to the MSD.
If you are using apps that you can access on a browser, Facebook, Gmail, etc, uninstall them and use the browser.

Helps save a lot of space on your phone.
 
When I had to switch out my S5, I backed up my contacts, launcher, and several other apps from the app itself. They generated a backup file, which I stored on the MSD card.

For your space issue, move all your photos, music and documents to the MSD.
If you are using apps that you can access on a browser, Facebook, Gmail, etc, uninstall them and use the browser.

Helps save a lot of space on your phone.
 
With a little more insight, it's time to rephrase the problem. Yes, I have photos on my device that Photos won't remove through Free Up Space because they're not backed up, even tho Photos also says that a complete backup has been done.

But the unmovable photos are a minor part of the problem - only about 40MB.

The real problem is my audio files, a.k.a. my music - almost 30GB.

According to Smart Manager, I have 29.65GB in audio files that are gunking up my drive. That's probably the entire music library that's on my phone.

But My Files says there are no audio files on my phone; they're all on my SD card.

Meanwhile, Smart Manager says that I have only 2% free on my 32GB internal drive.

What can I do to keep my music library AND free up space on my device?

And then there are the bookmarks on Chrome and Samsung Internet. How do I back up or export the bookmarks, if nothing else?

The available space on my device is shrinking from day to day. It's as tho something in the internal drive is inflating like a balloon, all by itself. Clearing the cache doesn't help.

I have no desktop or laptop computer, only this phone and a tablet. I suppose I can do the job with a big thumb drive or two, but ONLY if whoever's in charge of the Internet café says I can.

What's to be done?
 
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I have to ask, what exactly is this "Smart Manager"? Google search seems to indicate it's a Samsung feature, but my Galaxy S7 doesn't have it. So can't really help you there.
 
I'm thinking of one possible stratagem:

On a rented computer at a café I trust, I could move the music files to one or two 32GB thumb drives. They would be my backups. (Since my music is in 3 different folders on my SD card, it would be easy to divide up my music library if need be.)

Then when the music is off my SD card, I can use Smart Manager to delete the monstrosity that's on my internal drive.

When that is done, I can copy the moved audio files back to my SD card.

Sound OK?
 
Can't you just use an OTG adapter and connect the thumb drives directly to the phone and copy using the file manager? That would be simpler than trying to use an Internet cafe for this.
 
Sorry to reveal my cluelessness, but what's an OTG adapter?

Thanks for the tip, and it may be fine for the future, but at this point, when something is sucking up my available space, a trip to the Internet café may be more practical than a trip to Best Buy.

If for no other reason than time's a-wastin'.

Is there a virus that sucks up space on mobile devices?
 
OTG is "USB on the go" - a little adapter that let's you plug the flash drive directly into the phone. It's been supported by pretty much all phones for the last 5 years.

Blaming oddities on a "virus" is almost always wrong. I put "virus" in quotes because there actually aren't any viruses for android - there is malware, but it's properly classified as "trojan". The difference is that viruses can propagate themselves, whereas trojans are malware that's disguised in an app that the user downloads and installs (like the trojan horse). This bit of pedantry is important because as long as you have only installed apps from curated sites like the Play Store you are very unlikely to have picked up a trojan.
 
simpler said:
Sorry to reveal my cluelessness, but what's an OTG adapter?

Thanks for the tip, and it may be fine for the future, but at this point, when something is sucking up my available space, a trip to the Internet café may be more practical than a trip to Best Buy.

If for no other reason than time's a-wastin'.

Is there a virus that sucks up space on mobile devices?
Click to expand...

I don't think so. AFAICT malware is usually intended to try to make money for whomever made it, like stealing your private data, encrypting your private data and holding it to ransom, showing ads, sending spam, DDoS attacks, and maybe even crypto-currency mining on your device. If you've just been installing apps from trusted sources like Google or Amazon you should be safe.
 
Because with a factory reset I would lose more than my music - for one thing, I'd lose my bookmarks.

I have accidentally downloaded PDF files - I think that's about all.

But if I don't have a virus, why is the used space on my internal drive expanding like a balloon? Yesterday it was 98% after clearing the cache; today it's 99% after clearing the cache.
 
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simpler said:
..... According to Smart Manager, I have 29.65GB in audio files that are gunking up my drive. That's probably the entire music library that's on my phone.
....
Click to expand...

OK, so a S5 came with either 16 or 32GB depending on which variation. If this 'Smart Manager' app is indeed telling you that there's almost 30GB of music files stored in your internal memory, it's either a matter where you're interpreting the results incorrectly or the app is not very accurate. Even if you have a 32GB model that would mean there's no operating system, no apps, and essentially no other files/documents on your phone. If you're just reading the Smart Manager results wrong than that's one thing, but otherwise reading through this thread, personally I'm just writing that Smart Manager app off as Samsung crapware and you might be better off not relying on it as an accurate reflection of your phone's actual internal storage.

If you look in your Storage >> More >> Storage menu, is that showing more or less what you can determine is the actual free space on your S5's internal storage? If you are down to just MBs of free space there's obviously a lot of files and things for you to deal with. Try installing this 'DiskUsage' app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage&hl=en_US
It won't take up much space but it will give you a graphical representation of what's residing in your phone. Then you can use the My Files app to move whatever you can over to your microSD card, free up some space, and then set up a working backup solution.
 
No, I don't think I'm confusing the internal and external drives.

Went to the Internet café, armed with a brand new 64GB from the Staples that is conveniently on the way to the café. This is my favorite of the Internet cafés I know that are still in business; they take care of their computers and they have knowledgeable staff minding the store. The young man running things this evening was VERY helpful. But even he couldn't get all the music files on the thumb drive by closing time, so I will have to pay a second visit to finish the job.

Almost half my MP3 library is in a humongous folder (over 1400 files), so the contents of it have to be copied piecemeal.

No, my stuffed internal drive is not a figment of Cheetah crapware; it showed up on the PC's Windows Explorer too. And the resources of the PC were really strained, so much that after a while I couldn't get a game of solitaire going. The technician in charge let me play on a neighboring computer while the copying job was going on. I watched some videos of the Kavanaugh hearings on YouTube :)

My heartfelt thanks to this young man - I don't think I could have done it all by myself.
 
Well, I'm copying all my music to a flash drive, I'm nearly done, and I'll be happy to have this backup, but that's not the heart of the matter.

And NO, I am NOT confusing the two drives.

The internal drive shows every sign of being full. Can't download anything, not even updates to the apps I have. Can't open Gallery. Some apps don't work; other apps are constantly closing. Storage, in Settings, reports the available space in the internal drive is just a few megabytes, or a few kilobytes, or zero bytes.

Clearing the cache, at best, frees up 1.6MB, usually less. Sometimes I actually have less available space after I clear the cache.

And it's not just Smart Manager that says the drive is full. On all the computers I've used in the Internet café when I copy my music files to a thumb drive, when I view the contents of my S5 device, I ALWAYS see the bar marked"Phone" as almost full and in red. You're going to blame Smart Manager for that?

I cannot access the music files, photos, ebooks, etc. through My Files. My Files says they aren't there. But the space taken up by them is, on both the device and the card. When I look in Smart Manager to see what's taking up the space on the device, it displays the music files, photos, and documents, the files that are supposed to have been either moved to the SD card or downloaded directly to the SD card, as Amazon does.

Some space on the device is freed up when I send a Kobo book or two back to the cloud. But why should it? My ebooks are on the SD card.

A third-party app might help in sorting out the files, but to repeat: I cannot download an update to an app, let alone a whole app. That's what the Google Play Store tells me.

So to anyone who thinks I'm confusing the two drives: why do you ask?

So is this a feature of Marshmallow? Is it because the phone I bought was refurbished rather than new? And if it's not malware, what is it?

Before I do a factory reset I want to salvage two things: my password file and my bookmarks. Any way to store my bookmarks on an external storage device or in the cloud, so they don't get wiped out forever in a factory reset? Don't tell me to install a third-party app - there isn't room for one.
 
If you use Chrome as your browser and youre signed in to your Gmail account in Chrome, there's no need to backup your bookmarks, Google saves them across all devices
 
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