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Confused about free space on my Android phone

T

TheMink

Lurker
Hello -
I've had problems with freeing available space on my Huawei T-Mobile MyTouch running Gingerbread. (Yes, it's old.) Today I installed a new 16GB SD card. I currently don't have any more issues with space but I'm trying to figure out as much as I can about it. I've heard this phone has a huge amount of bloatware, which seems to be the case.
I've installed the apps DiskUsage (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage&hl=en) and Clean Cache (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bazinga.cacheclean) and App Mgr III (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.a0soft.gphone.app2sd). I'm wondering about what I see when I run DiskUsage. In the "View" menu it shows the options "App Storage", "Storage card", "/HWUserData" (I assume the HW stands for Huawei) and "/mnt/sdcard". Inside App Storage it shows a large block called "Data" that's 881MiB and includes "Applications", "System data", and "Free space" (90.8 MiB). (I don't understand why this doesn't also include the contents of "/HWUserData".) Storage card contains a block that's also called "Storage card" that's 239 MiB. Then /HWUserData is a block of 1.99 GiB (I'm assuming this is all of the internal memory of my phone) and inside it, among other things, is a block called "Android" (1.75 MiB) and a huge block called "Free space" (1.98 GiB). Can I install whatever I want in that free space? Because it doesn't seem like I have that much free space. And then in /mnt/sdcard is a big (14.8 GiB) block called "/mnt/sdcard" and "Apps2SD" (the alternate name of App Mgr III), but mainly a 14.8 GiB block of free space. Why is this larger (much larger) than what I get when I scan "Storage card"?
 
I just tried to download "Easy Uninstaller App Uninstall" and I got an "Insufficient storage" error. When I click on "View storage" I have 14.82 GB of Available space in Storage settings, 1.98 GB of Available space in Internal User Storage, and 91.43 MB of Available space in Internal System Storage. How do I use this space it says I have available?
 
Update: I deleted about 3 MB of cache files and was able to download and install the app, which I think is less than 10 MB. Why couldn't I install with the 91.43 MB of Internal System Storage that I had available? (Assuming I even had to use the internal system storage.)
 
Do you take a lot of photos/videos? You should try to move them all to your SD card and change your phone's camera settings to save new photos/videos to the SD card. This can save a TON of space if you're the type to use your camera a lot.
 
TheMink said:
Update: I deleted about 3 MB of cache files and was able to download and install the app, which I think is less than 10 MB. Why couldn't I install with the 91.43 MB of Internal System Storage that I had available? (Assuming I even had to use the internal system storage.)
Click to expand...
You do have to use the internal storage. But Android won't let you fill it: it requires some free working storage, so to keep the system stable there is a minimum level below which it won't let you install more apps. Sounds like your phone has this set at 100MB, which is very low by current standards, and even for phones with only a 2GB data partition it's usually higher than that. In short you are lucky you didn't meet this limit earlier.
 
AMOCO said:
You could root,CWM Recovery,& then say put an 16 to 32gb. sd card in it.And partition your internal memory to 4gb.
I did this with my old Samsung Galaxy Precedent.
Click to expand...

Do you know of an article or something that tells me how to do this? I might try it. (I have a 16GB SD card.)
 
Rob said:
Do you take a lot of photos/videos? You should try to move them all to your SD card and change your phone's camera settings to save new photos/videos to the SD card. This can save a TON of space if you're the type to use your camera a lot.
Click to expand...

I stopped using this phone for photos and videos -- glad I did.
 
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