Can't see 9GB of used "System and User Data".

[GreenWitcher]

I've got a Galaxy J2 with supposedly 9GB out of 16 used. I used DiskUsage and the Storage option in Settings, and to my avail I could not find all of the used space in my internal storage. The storage settings says it's 9GB of System and User Data used, but even showing hidden folders doesn't show me that. I'm not rooted, and would like to avoid that.

Is there anyway to finally find, once and for good, all my used data in the internal storage?

 

[Shotgun84]

I think your phone's spot on there. Sounds like 9gb is saved for system, ie your os. Since you're not rooted you can't actually go into the system files and play around with them so that's why I'd guess it looks like a lot of space is missing.

 

[GreenWitcher]

Wow, so Android OS is roughly 9GB? That's a pretty bad way of cheating someone out of 9GB. =\

 

[n0tall0wed]

Wow, so Android OS is roughly 9GB? That's a pretty bad way of cheating someone out of 9GB. =\

No it's Android uses a percentage of your phone space. For example my 128 gig Note 9 roughly 23 gigs is Android System reserved.

 

[GreenWitcher]

Anyway to clean it out at least? Can I do it without rooting?

 

[n0tall0wed]

Anyway to clean it out at least? Can I do it without rooting?

Usually nope reserved for system files and updates. Which updates once installed should clear out of cache if you go to your storage settings and clear cache.

 

[Hadron]

No it's Android uses a percentage of your phone space. For example my 128 gig Note 9 roughly 23 gigs is Android System reserved.

It's really a matter of how much space the manufacturer allocated. What you see is not how much space the system firmware uses but how big the partitions are - there may be empty space in them, but as you can't access that it shows as used. For that reason even if you could delete stuff from them it wouldn't help: the user partition would not get larger, so you'd have no more space available.

There is no need at all for a higher capacity phone to have larger system partitions, but we know that Samsung do that for some reason (e.g. a 128 GB version of the same Samsung phone will allocate more space to the system than a 64 GB version). I don't know whether others do this, but it makes no sense to me. There is the business of binary Vs decimal which can muddy this, but I've done the sums on that before and it isn't just that.

And it does depend somewhat on manufacturer: my 128GB Pixel 2 uses a little less than 9GB, and it has dual system partitions (which last I heard Samsung had not adopted), so its ROM is a fraction of the size of Samsung's.

Disabling any system apps you don't need will save space, but that's because it removes their data and any updates to them, both of which use your space rather than the system partition. That's as much as you can do.

All computers are like this: the capacity you see includes space used by the system. Same for an iPhone or a PC.