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Help What's using up my card space?

H

haldroidx

Newbie
When I plug my S3 into my PC's USB port, Windows Explorer shows that the card as only 3.52 GB free out of 14.9. I figured I'd navigate through its file system to see where I could free up some space. (This was after I'd already copied all my photos over to my PC and deleted them from the phone.) But when I navigate down one level into the card, select all folders and files, right-click and request Properties, it tells me that I have 211 folders and only 6 files, for a total of 177 KB. (I had just moved all my photos to my PC and erased them from the card, which freed up a couple gig.) Where is 11+ GB of data hiding on my card, if not in the file system?
 
Are you showing hidden / system files in Windows Explorer?

Also, have you tried looking with an Android file manager from the Play Store? I use a free one called File Manager.
 
My Windows Explorer is configured to display both hidden and system files. But I downloaded the File Manager from Rhythm Software from Google Play and it's showing a much, much richer structure than I could see in Windows Explorer and many directories and files that I didn't know were there, not to mention both "sdCard" and "extSdCard". I'm going to have to figure this out. Thanks for the pointer.
 
Just remember sdcard or sdcard0 is the internal storage and around 4gb of that is partitioned for android system and system apps (without root you wont have access to these though)
 
if you have root access you can view all of the files through a file manager ap in the phone. Windows explorer will not. It will only show you the external storage and internal storage. Sometimes if you check internal storage (at least for me) for some reason it duplicates the entire internal storage into a folder sdcard0 within the internal storage folder if that makes sense.
 
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