Help How to find large files taking up space?

[Wendy Cutler]

Since I last looked a few days ago, my phone's internal space has just gone from maybe 2/3 full to almost totally full, just 426mb of 11.5gb remains.

How do I find out what has used the space? I was for a day or two connected to a Dropbox folder with several 1gb files, but I left that folder and do not see it listed in my Dropbox. I did a search on a filename that was in the folder and it was not found. I didn't ever look at those files from my phone, and I did not anywhere mark them as Offline, so really, maybe this is unrelated. My photos are almost all on my SD card and my music is all on my SD card, and that is under control, a little over half full.

I could use some hints about what to look for and where. And with so little free space, will I even have trouble removing a large file?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Dannydet]

use your file explorer app or get one from the play store

 

[Wendy Cutler]

Thank you. I finally found a file app on my phone that would show me the folders and then files sorted by size. I was able to use it long enough to find some files to delete, except that I couldn't seem to delete them from there, but I deleted them from my desktop. I can't get it now to show me the files on my device - oh, wait, it's Astro, Internal storage; click the three lines at upper left, click Tools, SD Card Usage (no wonder I couldn't find it again for internal storage), and it shows the folders sorted by size, largest first. I also found an app manager and deleted a few apps. I did get the free storage under 1gb, and the line is blue now, not red.

Ah, now I have just deleted all my Offline Dropbox files and freed up 3gb. I deleted a lot of cache files here and there. But since my last deletion and restart, all I did was delete 200 or so Offline Dropbox files that show as totalling 50mb in my Dropbox folder on my desktop. I have gobs of space now. I hope the device still works.

 

[Wendy Cutler]

I am recording this for my own info, but if someone has some useful advice to prevent recurrences of this problem, please do add it.

I just got a warning that I had only 171mb space free on the phone storage. When I looked again in Astro, there was nothing much larger than when I had reduced the space before. The filesize usage didn't seem to add up to more than a few gb, with no folder over 547mb. So I looked at my apps, and Google Photos said it was using over 6gb. I clicked uninstall, and it asked if I wanted to uninstall the updates, so I guess I can't uninstall the product itself. I said yes, and I'm back down to 5gb free. Well, specifically, before updating 17 apps including Google Photos, I had 5.26gb free. After the update, I have 4.93gb free.

I've turned off Google Photos backup and Sync. What did it do, keep an extra copy of everything it backed up?

 

[Xavier Black]

No, You did good uninstalling the updates for Google play store and services, normally by doing that you can free a lot..and of course if you root your phone and then uninstalling junk apps, that's more room for you..

That's a pretty bad ass device you got..you can conquer a lot with it..