Galaxy S5; will a factory reset free up some internal storage space?

[bigliam1970]

Hi all,

Galaxy S5 16Gb recently upgraded (note, upgraded, not done a clean install yet) to Marshmallow 6.0.1.

Even though I have moved everything I can to my external SD card, I am still occupying 15.75Gb of the 16 available.

Clean Master App does a good job of clearing out junk and cache files on occasion, but I am now constantly running out of internal space.

Question: Will a factory reset reduce the amount of space occupied on the internal storage? Has 'upgrading' to 6.0.1 left a load of residual crap on my phone, or do I just have to live with the fact that Marshmallow is a big Android version?

I don't really want to have to do a clean reinstall if it not going to make any difference to my internal storage.

Cheers in advance for your help.

Bigliam1970

 

[PoorHs07]

Hello,

Factory reset often will not only free up the phone internal storage space and also remove all installed apps, programs, delete all messages, photos, videos and files there.

Therefore, if you only need to free up the phone space, you’d better not do a factory reset there. Just try to move all important phone data to phone memory card or else storage devices.

Or you can also save phone data backups on another storage device and also do a factory reset there. Of course, in this way, another apps and games reinstalling is also necessary.

 

[Hadron]

Has there been a big change in your storage use since the update? You don't actually say. Have you tried a storage analysis tool to see what is actually using the space (even the system menu)? It's hard to answer without more information. I can say that a factory reset will leave you with as much free space as it is possible to have on this device, but not whether it will leave you significantly better off once you've restored everything (don't have enough information to assess that).

As for MM just being big, the question is whether it has changed the sizes of the system partition (and hence reduced the size of the data partition). Most updates don't, which means that even if they are larger you don't notice anything. But I've heard of the occasional one that does. If you knew the size of your partitions before and after the update you could see whether that was the case. After is easy: a tiny app called "Storage Truth" will show you this. Before is trickier. From the current sizes we could work out whether any update had shrunk your space, but not whether it was this particular one. But you can't change that, so all this would tell you is what the maximum available internal space is.

When you say "Clean Master" do you mean Samsung's Smart Manager, which contains some code derived from that app, or do you mean you've installed Clean Master itself? Do you know that Cheetah Mobile, who provide that app, make their money by mining and monetising the data of people who install their apps? It is widely known as a privacy risk. And people who have used that app (we have some former users here) report that it tells you it is doing more than it actually does.

 

[Patty W]

Hi all,

Galaxy S5 16Gb recently upgraded (note, upgraded, not done a clean install yet) to Marshmallow 6.0.1.

Even though I have moved everything I can to my external SD card, I am still occupying 15.75Gb of the 16 available.

Clean Master App does a good job of clearing out junk and cache files on occasion, but I am now constantly running out of internal space.

Question: Will a factory reset reduce the amount of space occupied on the internal storage? Has 'upgrading' to 6.0.1 left a load of residual crap on my phone, or do I just have to live with the fact that Marshmallow is a big Android version?

I don't really want to have to do a clean reinstall if it not going to make any difference to my internal storage.

Cheers in advance for your help.

Bigliam1970

Why not go to storage and explore files and delete to free up some space there's usually junk folders. Don't you have a cleaning app to keep junk cleaned up?? It's an idea. Patty

 

[mongobird]

I have run into a similar problem with a Moto X second generation. Actually, there is almost 3gb which has "disappeared" and counts against the available memory, but does not show up as being allocated to anything. That means that if one totals up all the storage consumed as shown in the settings app, the total will be less than the storage not available.

The factory reset, while not showing any promise, could be real attractive if some storage was recovered. Especially since this phone does not have an SD slot.