Help Phone suddenly filled up internal storage by itself, cannot fix

[JaSB]

The other night my wife's phone started complaining that it was "Low on space", "Internal phone storage is getting low".

When we clicked on the notification it took us to the App manager and there were 0 bytes free in the Device memory.

This was particularly odd because she only has 15 apps installed, whereas I have 190 installed (including almost all the same apps she has) and she has very few media files.

So I uninstalled an app, to free up a few MB -- and within about two seconds there were 0 bytes free again!

I repeated this a few more times, and every time the newly-created space would disappear within seconds.

I did a bit of Googling and the only hint I could find of a problem was some reports of a Wifi issue where log files would fill up storage. This made some sense as that same day I'd been playing with a different Wifi router and used the same network name but a different password, so it wouldn't be able to connect -- but that could just be a coincidence.

Unfortunately there seemed to be no way to recover from this problem unless you had a rooted phone other than to do a factory reset -- which would suck, because one game she's spent countless hours playing (Smurf's Village) doesn't use Google Backup Services to store progress.

Another odd symptom was that the battery was slowly going flat even while on the charger. That indicates that something was using a lot of CPU even though nothing was running. The back of the phone was also really hot near the camera, like when the CPU is very busy.

So eventually we shut it down and rebooted it the next day. I deleted another app and this time the memory stayed free. (I was afraid to shut it down the night before in case it couldn't boot with no storage space, but eventually we had no choice because the battery went flat.)

So now I have a phone that supposedly has some free memory (19 MB free at the moment in "Device memory", nearly 11 GB in "USB storage").

But if I try to move an app to "SD card" it says "Failed to move application: Not enough memory". I thought that I was able to do that before I installed an SD card in my phone and that it actually moved it to the 11 GB of "USB storage" that the phone has, but her phone is refusing to move anything.

If I try to install an app -- I wanted to try "Disk Usage" to see if the place where the unwanted data ended up was visible -- it downloads OK but then says:

"Error: Application cannot be installed in the default install location."

This is despite "Disk Usage" being only 150 KB and the internal storage now having 19 MB free.

So I'm stuck -- I cannot move anything (apart from media files) from the internal storage to the 11 GB of free "USB storage" and I cannot install anything.

Can anyone help?

The ideal outcome would be fixing the phone while keeping the "Smurf's Village" save file and not having to root it. I have the Android SDK but not sure if it will help.

Thanks,
Jason.

Edit: Sorry, should have mentioned that she's still running stock 2.3.3, Baseband version is I9100XXKE7. I don't think it's been updated since we bought it in December.

 

[Slug]

First thing I'd recommend is to update the firmware via Kies. Iirc this "low space" error (and occasional high CPU usage) were corrected in 2.3.4. The update shouldn't cause any loss of user data.

 

[JaSB]

First thing I'd recommend is to update the firmware via Kies. Iirc this "low space" error (and occasional high CPU usage) were corrected in 2.3.4. The update shouldn't cause any loss of user data.

Thanks, Slug. I've been planning to update her phone to ICS for a couple of weeks now (she wanted mine to be the guinea pig!) but after this happened I was worried about whether it's possible to do the update now given that the reported Internal Storage is so low. (Currently 19 MB.)

Is it safe to try doing an update in such a situation, or do I need to do a factory reset first?

The other thing I wasn't sure about was whether whatever is now occupying all the Internal Storage would be cleaned up during the update or not. If the phone still has no Internal Storage left post-update -- uninstalling her apps will only get back a hundred MB or so -- then I'd need to find some other solution anyway.

 

[coolsal]

Hello JasB, I had the exact same problem that you described, the only difference is that I have a Samsung Galaxy Q with 2.2. My internal storage suddenly went up like crazy and I don't have that many applications installed in the phone. I have left around 10 MB and won't allow me to download any other applications and have a message with 'memory full. I already moved all the applications that I could to the SD card. Were you able to fix your problem? How? Thank you

 

[JaSB]

Hi coolsal, I couldn't install anything so in the end I bit the bullet and upgraded it to ICS after doing a full backup -- and then discovered that the storage didn't come back. It wasn't growing anymore, so the problem that caused it was fixed, but there was no way to recover the storage that had been filled up with whatever it had been filled up with.

So I did a factory reset and that fixed it -- the internal storage was free again. After going through the setup process and pushing the apps back from Google Play it was as good as new except the stupid Smurf's Village didn't restore so all the saved data was lost, despite attempting to restore from the backup a couple of times. My wife was so disappointed she hasn't played the game since. (If you go on their forums there are plenty of people asking about this kind of thing and the answer is always that "only Apple provides a backup service", despite the fact that Google does and Kies does.)

But apart from that it's been good, ICS is working fine. (It took two goes to install it with Kies but I had the same problem with mine as well and had to use an Emergency Recovery Code on mine but it worked in the end.)

 

[Prithwin]

after you update, backup your data somewhere and do a factory reset, (need not select "wipe out sdcard" option).. make sure you have contacts saved up on google servers(go to contacts and select sync with google).

 

[Deleted User]

Slightly off topic, is smurf village any good once you get into it? Reason i ask is that i installed and started with one item on the map and then just quit. But then my phone started to get really hot. Almost like my phone was being used heavily! Does it always run in the background? I like games where i can actually exit and resume later! Lol