Help Internal Storage low on space

[sssteve72]

After reading multiple posts here I've not seen anyone with the same problem (but many similiar)

First I am not rooted.. considering it though...

I keep getting low on storage messages. Internal storage. I keep uninstalling apps and games and yet the internal storage keeps showing more used. But I have no idea what is using it. When I look at apps all on the internal storage here are top ones. I got 370mg used and 56mb free right now.

Map - 12.26mg
telenav - 9.78mb
gmail -5.88mb
shazam - 5.2mb
mail - 4.87mb
voicemail - 4.75mb
google services framework - 4.72mb
contacts storage - 4.70mb
voice search - 4.57mb
lookout - 4.55mb

I've gone thru and cleared cache's, moved apps to the sd card, even uninstalled updates which gained some room but after a few more days I usually get the message again. Once I had like 50mb free at night and in the morning it said like 42mb and I had not even touched my phone.
I've poked around with but I am not finding anything obviously large except when looking at the SD card i see gameloft for the nova game which I think my son downloaded the full version. Today I noticed a video was on my phone of like a commercial with two houses racing. I deleted it.

I just don't have anything on this phone in fact I have less than 30 apps that I downloaded. Could this just be like reminents of old apps I uninstalled and it never deleted all the files?

I get an system update available message once in a while. Did it download a large file that is taking up room waiting for me to install it?

Hardware 0004
android version 2.3.3

 

[ocnbrze]

well it is not just your apps but also data from your apps are just among a few other things that are stored in the phones internal memory. things like emails, texts and mms, your caches are all taking up space on your internal memory.

if you really want to free your phone and increase your memory you really should consider rooting your phone. with a rooted phone you can flash roms that are smaller in size and thus will have more internal space.

or you can upgrade your card to a class 6 or higher and partition it. this will allow apps to move fully to the card. the way you moved you apps now only moves part of the app. the majority of the app is still on the phone. but partitioning the card will allow the entire app ti be moved. i have an evo that has 160 apps and they are all on my card!!!! but i have a 16g class 10 card.

just some thoughts.

 

[sssteve72]

Yeah but I just don't have that much data on my phone or at least I don't think that I do. I don't store songs, video, pictures... My emails are limited to 3 days worth of emails.. (exchange server). I hardly text at all. If I uninstall every single app I have I bet there is still only around 75mb free for internal storage. I know there had to be more than that when I got the phone. When you uninstall an app does it not remove all associated data along with it or is it leaving traces behind?
It seems to me this is like I install a game and for a few weeks I have it and maybe it stored data because it was free and it stored data for ads. Then I uninstalled the game but the data for the ads is still there.

I don't even use much of the SD card.. I still have 6Gigs free.

Is there no way to browse the internal storage files?

 

[sssteve72]

So for those who find this later. I was still having problems so today I uninstalled every program I had downloaded.

This left me with 105MB free. Which I knew was not correct as my wife (same phone) has like 270MB free and she only has like 5 apps.

So after uninstalling everything and showing 105MB free of internal memory (not SD card) I did a factory data reset. Now mind you... before I did this factory data reset I had ZERO apps on the phone with 105MB internal memory free and after the reset I now have 378MB free of internal memory.

Obviously something wasn't working right as every app was showing an enlarged amount of memory usage. for example Maps was showing 12.26MB of usage.. now after the reset it is showing only 3.11MB of usage... TeleNav which was showing 9.78MB of sage now says 2.03MB I had even uninstalled updates cleared cache's and data before and yet the apps were still showing a lot of storage usage.

So I don't know what was causing it but a factory data reset definately solved it. So anyone else that seems to be experiencing internal memory being used up for no apparent reason this may help you. Make sure you have your account names and passwords for email or anything else as you will need those after the reset. Backup your contacts, (I didn't have to backup mine but I use exchange server for contacts).

Anyway hope this helps someone.

 

[Rxpert83]

Interesting... never seen anything like that before. Usually a cache/data cleaning cuts it down to normal

Glad you got it all sorted out

 

[sssteve72]

I just restored my exchange account which brought all my mail, contacts, and calendar back into my phone. And I currently have 356MB free. Between my post above and this one I installed Dropbox yesterday and it shows that Dropbox is taking up 4.13MB so I would say my contacts, email, and calendar are taking up an approximately additional 18MB. I use this for work so there is quite a few contacts and lots of calendar appointments. My wife uses Cozi for our calendar and I have that linked up to my outlook so my calendar on my phone has both my work appointments and my home appointments, so it is fairly large.

But anyway everything is working well since my reset.