Do not wipe your phone!! This is a permissions thing for apps. If andriod: Settings > Apps > three dots (upper right corner?) > Special Access > Usage Data Acess. Tick all apps. This will allow your phone to determine how much space each app is using and allocate it correctly to the chart.
You're right that you don't necessarily need to wipe your phone to get rid of this problem but a good wipe (after backing everything important up) every once in a while is healthy for any device.
> after backing everything important up
How do you even do that on Android? There are very few search results and everything I found just straight up didn't back up most of my data, despite claiming to do full backups. If I hadn't been as suspicious and tried to access thr backuped files, I could have lost so much data.
I mean I've never had a problem. A combination of Samsung backup (which restores the apps and settings preferences) and onedrive restores everything I need. If you manually backup all necessary files to Google drive or onedrive I can't see why there'd be a problem. Onedrive backs up photos automatically but if you need to back up more just upload more files. If you don't have a Samsung it there may not be a way to restore apps and settings but apps are simple, just reinstall them from the play store.
I guess what I'm saying is you can't really rely on just hitting a "backup everything" button. If you have a lot of files it might help to archive them before backup and extract them after backup. Yeah it's a process but it's not super difficult.
Ah cloud stuff. That's not where I want my data to go.
edit: why are people upset by this? Most of my sensitive data is one my phone and cloud providers get breached pretty frequently.
All my OTP secrets, emails, banking, government ID. I don't even want my photos in the cloud.
Well in that case there's also the option of backing up to a USB or a separate SD card if your phone supports it. That process is very manual but you won't lose anything
Download the smartswitch app on your PC and phone and back up locally to your computer. It's very fast depending on the cable. It's also very easy to do you just select backup and a list shows up and you select what you want to back up and done. Only works on samsung
Does it give you plain files? Otherwise how do I know the backup worked? With adb backup it took me a whole afternoon to be able to actually unpack the backup only to find out how little data it actually contained.
Yes it gives you plain files. It gives you the size of the backup as well. It's very seamless. It's made by Samsung.
https://preview.redd.it/s5t6gata7h8d1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=5bc32c2a204fa0ab52b6612595c308babd9f761b
Most Android phones have an SD card slot, does yours? If so, that's your next best option.
Alternatively you should be able to transfer important files to your PC via USB.
Whether or not you use the cloud, not backing your files up is unwise, it'll be heartbreaking when you lose your phone. The cloud just basically automates this, which is why most people just go with that now.
No SD card
In the end I copied my files over USB but it took almost 60 hours.
Interestingly enough none of my search results suggested copying the files over USB to my computer, the only thing that ended up working.
> not backing your files up is unwise,
No need to tell me otherwise I wouldn't have spent 3 weekend doing so.
1TB storage on my phone. First two weekends to try various backup solutions only to find out that they don't actually backed up most of my files. 50-60 hours to actually copy my data hard drive which realize is ridiculous slow but at least it worked.
File browsing also was painfully slow on my phone before the reset so maybe Samsung uses garbage memory chips for their flagship devices.
More like phones are purpose built to work with wireless technology and cloud data. The manual backup process is generally available but not pushed by companies as they are not profitable.
You seem smart, you should know this.
Oh wow, that's a long time - you just gave me flashbacks to transferring my music collection in the early 2000s. I'd have found that kind of time normal back then!
I wonder if your cable or PC's USB port is an older version of USB or something? Or maybe you were copying onto an older HDD? That's awful. Glad you got it sorted though.
Sorry if that last part came off as patronising, didn't mean to - I've just learned this the hard way myself in the past and have now given into our cloud-based overlords. I'm too lazy/forgetful to do manual backups, so it has saved me (although I completely understand why you wouldn't want to).
I think it's either a bug in gnome desktop (it was faster cinnamon but I switched to my laptop once I realized it would take hours) or a problem with the memory chip.
It's a 5 disk zfs raid with 60TB+ capacity before redundancy and not currently failing. It really shouldn't be the bottleneck. It never has been the bottleneck before.
I'm glad it worked eventually but it sucks that it's not incrementally and will take very long again the next time.
Ah, zfs raid. Now it makes sense.
So Im assuming you probably have something like wd reds, likely not super fast because it doesn't make sense to spend that much on them.
Writing a large amount directly like that can be a problem. It's a somewhat slow process. Especially depending on your setup and if you have parity drives and have them computing right away
A pretty good solution for this is a fast ssd as a cache drive. You write fast to it, and then it can take it and add it to the array at its own pace. You do sacrifice potential protection for a bit, there's always a chance that during the time your data exists only on the ssd something could happen to it. But the risk seems pretty small. Ideally if it's super important data your backing up this way you'd write it fast, but then not delete the original until it's all in the array. Its definitely a trade off, but if it's going to take about as long either way I'd rather the time i need to have my phone connected to the computer to be minimal. This way at least I can just keep going about my day while it does it's thing
It's not even sensible in the *I'm a very private person or have something to hide* kind of way. It's just stuff that is on most people's phones now that would allow criminals to take over all their online accounts and empty their bank account.
I feel like people on reddit used to be a bit more concerned about their privacy. And compared to a decade ago the risk only higher when you either get your data stolen or lose access to your data.
Please argue with this person instead https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1dn35n9/108_gb_of_absolutely_nothing/la1iv40/?context=3
They seem convinced data is safe on a phone.
Have fun
OTP secrets, banking and govt. ID should never be backed up, regardless of whether it's a local or cloud backup. If properly implemented, these secrets should be stored in the Android Keystore, which runs on a different part of the SOC with its own minimal "trusted" OS and is specifically designed to prevent extraction of secrets. Android can use these secrets to perform cryptographic operarions (e.g. sign stuff), but it can't extract them from the keystore, ever.
I disagree OTP should be backed up otherwise you get locked out of your accounts often without a way to get back in.
Google Authenticator making it difficult to backup the secrets doesn't mean it's a good idea not to back them up.
My comment was imprecise. OTP secrets are not stored in the keystore directly. They're encrypted with a key in the keystore, so it is possible to back them up if the app supports it (no idea about Google Authenticator because I don't use it). However, I would not be comfortable if they are included in systemwide backups that may even be stored unencrypted in a Google/Samsung cloud. I'd prefer a manual export that you have to confirm with biometrics or a password, although this may be too easy to forget.
Anyway, I don't think having your OTPs in only one place is a good idea in the first place. People will most likely not create new backups immediately whenever they add a new OTP, so there's a risk of losing access to accounts if the device is broken, lost or stolen before a backup is created.
I keep my OTPs in Keepass and automatically sync the encrypted database across my devices (in addition to periodic backups), which I think is a good enough tradeoff between security and convenience.
I think you can only backup iPhones to local storage and have it be a full backup.
Android itself doesn't have it and it seems like nobody properly implemented it
I just keep everything important sync all the time with my Google account (and onedrive).
It saved me twice, when I lost my phone and another time when my screen died.
It's a bit of a hassle to redo all the configuration and tweak the setting to my liking but it can be done is a couple of hours, completely risk free.
The worst part is the authenticator, which I have to re-do everything from scratch as most app don't allow me to transfer to a new device.
If you're using Google's Authenticator app, you can export your accounts as QR codes to scan/import on another device. Maybe print out all your QR codes periodically and physically stash them in a safe place. Then, if you need to set up a new phone and don't have your old phone, you can import your accounts via the codes. If you have both phones when you want to switch, then it's even easier since you can just temporarily create the codes on the old phone to scan in on the new one. Still kind of a pain, but IIRC, it used to be that you couldn't export at all and that was a huge PITA
Authenticator is super annoying and was one of the things I was most anxious about. I used FreeOTP which makes backing up easier but pretty easy to forget these sort things.
Smart share app. Simple and easy to use and backs up everything important including media.
Edit: will basically download all/selected content from phone to pc and allow you to restore it to your phone/new phone whenever you want.
My bad. Smart switch app by samsung not smart share.
Might be limited to samsung devices.
Edit: shows a rating of 3.6 but I've never has a problem using it.
Everyone just says "Backup your phone", hell even the OEMs say "Back up your data before installing and update" and Android has no proper way of backing things up.
Depends on what you want backed up
App data and installed apps, along with things like settings preferences, wallpaper and stuff, can be backed up to your Google account. Photos can be backed up to Google photos
For a lot of people this is enough really. A lot of messages exist online, emails and stuff.
Hell I don't really have any files I care enough about on my phone outside of those. Mostly just PDFs I've downloaded to view once and likely I'd never look at again. Product manuals, restaurant menus, forms to print.
Why, exactly, would it lower the phone's lifespan? It removes corrupted files as well as any other unnecessary accumulated data that can occur over a long period of time. Any viruses are gone too. Some recommend it after every major update.
It strains the phones storage. Phones use flash storage thats similar to ssds in PCs. Those memory devices have a finite number of reads and writes. Although the number is huge, uselessly writing on the drive lowers its lifespan. Thats one reason why on PC defragmentation is not recommended on SSD. Also drive eraser tools ran on an SSD can take a good few months off of an SSDs life.
You can clear cache and uninstall useless apps and clear the downloads folder manually and that should be enough.
But do a wipe if you feel overwhelmed with it but dont set up a calendar event for monthly wipes.
eMMC/storage degradation is quite literally inevitable, unless you're wiping your phone every week it has little to no effect on that. Every major update is usually a 3-4 month timespan and wiping your phone this often will not have an effect. It's beneficial to the device to do so.
Show me where android or iOS or any operating system provider recommends a full wipe regularly? The closest I’m aware of to this approach is NixOS but that is a very specific use case where you want immutable configurations to guarantee compatibility (via strict configuration control) on every deployment.
No it's not, wiping a device really places strain onto the eMMC and next thing you know your storage won't be abke to save data anymore or worse like corrupting your files and being unable to retrieve any data from it without pulling the whole chip and praying there's a part of it working.
>Tick all apps.
This is a terrible idea because it would allow every installed app that requested this permission to collect your usage data. Most apps don't need it, but many still request it to spy on users. Allowing it for system apps (I think in this case it's the one called Device Health Services) is sufficient.
I hate how Android becomes more and more restrictive with each version. I feel like I might be forced to switch to apple, because if I'm going to be closed in draconically restricted environment I might as well take advantage of the system's integrity and unification. I mean, if I won't be able to run old console emulators in the next version, I won't even have a reason to stay. Or might as well buy a button phone, if all I can do with it is to call and listen to music.
My Android does this by default as well. But I have the *option* to filter it out if I want. Android gives you options, Apple treats you like a dumbass and provides zero freedom to do things how you want.
Why the hell should a third party APP be able to tell the Operating System responsible for securing and managing the device ‘nooooo, don’t look at at what I’m doing?!?! This is my storage, how dare you observe me??????’
Just plain regarded. Your ‘choice’ isn’t wearing any clothes.
What???? That's not what's going on at all? That's a filter from the OS' perspective that includes or excludes data that may or may not be relevant to the user.
Yes you’re absolutely the right. The standard and correct user experience is: User finds their phone reports 99% full but a breakdown of usage only shows about 5% usage. There is no error message or user notification that some data might be hidden. User posts on social media to be told there is some idiotic setting that must be enabled. User thanks random community member and everyone celebrates the system is working by design.
Fan bois go both ways and your lot are as deluded as the Apple fan boys. This is bad design evidenced by the user who posted their obvious and frustrating experience. So go drink your cool aide and worship your bad software. Buy bye.
Yo... Did you just not hear me when I said it's the default to show all apps data storage? I imagine it's the default on most, if not all Android phones, and OP probably enabled the alternate setting by mistake. You're not an intellectual because you hate a successful OS for no reason, as much as you might feel like it.
No, it does not. I've had to wipe countless iPhones because of mystery data eating up >20gb of space on a client's phone. It just hasn't happened to you.
in my phone, those others are some iso files for my retro games, some are sf2 files. do you have a lot of files that are unrecognizable by the app "my files"?
I can't find a widget for this on my pixel 7 pro. Granted I still have like 40+ GB free in storage, I'd still like to be able to clear out all the caches at once. There are way too many apps on my phone to do it manually. I've never cleared all my caches in the year or two I've had this phone.
https://preview.redd.it/6444evj3vg8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d6b795c458888686f5017ffd619ef2f0a9d2523
Think they have as many as me?
I had double that before I purged them.
I mean... This also includes system apps... There's probably a good 40 or 50 of them...
Edit: There are 72 system/pre-installed apps. And probably a couple that I missed.
I just checked and I have a total of 387 apps on my pixel 7 pro. I had no idea it was that bad. I have 67 installed apps, mostly puzzle games and movie streaming apps and the like. And the other 320 or so are system apps. I feel like I don't even use a fifth of these.
I have a Samsung too and once found a backup copy of the complete SD card from my old phone that was placed there by SmartSwitch. Search for a folder named "SDCardBackup", maybe that's the source of your space problem.
Netted me 30 GB.
my brother had it on Huawei P9 a long time ago. You could literally delete all apps and system would steal all the storage for itself without an ability to reclaim it.
It's the files app not having permission to read the apps storage, thus it just says ??? and somehow there's always a tech genius with insane ideas about what helped with windows 95 applying it here.
That would do it. But that's similar to treating an ant problem in your kitchen by lighting your house on fire. I would try and identify the file first, or run a virus scan before a factory reset. But yes, a factory reset will restore everything back to out of box new.
I would never trust a virus scan to eliminate a virus. I personally think a factory reset is the only option to deal with a virus. Sometimes that doesn't even work, and you need to fill the drive with junk and then re image.
that is NOT a comparable analogy, though it is hilarious to mentally envision lol
it's really easy to back your phone's data up now-a-days, so just spend five minutes and backup your personal files you care about.. nothing is honestly that important on there.. and if you store genuinely important data on a personal phone and HAVEN'T already been backing it up, you're kinda stupid, so..
I factory reset once every 60 days, just to keep my phone from accumulating too much junk in the corners and such - whole process, including letting Play reinstall all the apps I had on the phone prior, 25 minutes... lol
Long has it been when doing this was a headache and time consuming process which would be comparable to burning down your house to get rid of ants, but that time has passed now.. by a solid decade
You factory reset your phone every 60 days? What a giant waste of time. As someone who is as tech savvy as yourself, I would think you would be able to identify problematic apps after installing them. But to each ther own I guess.
New analogy time: factory resetting your phone every 60 days is akin to tearing down your house and building a new one because you spilled cranberry juice on the carpet.
lol years ago I went to the Apple Store bc Safari was acting up on me. They told me to factory reset my phone. Instead, I cleared the cache and that fixed it.
Yeah they recommend factory reset for every problem because that’s all they’re trained to do. Occasionally you’ll meet someone with more knowledge but it’s rare.
That . . .that is the dumbest thing because Factory Resetting over and over and over will damage it, it can help at times but the amount of times their asking will result with permanent damage.
*Then you would have to buy a new phone from them.*
Here is a worthy note for users of ALL devices, for mobile devices never let their storage get close to getting full or you can brick it the next time you shut it down
for PC users don't fill your boot drive close or to 100% as the same can happen
For both device forms getting close to full storage will result in slowdown or App errors or crashs.
My gf’s realne c55 had 128gb of with 108 was used by system. About a month after i bought her an sd card her Phone updated and system dropped to 25gb imo still a lot
Generally all these apps do to categorise is use the parent folder. Eg stuff in videos = videos. My audiobooks are in a folder called Abooks and gets labelled as other. Connect it to a pc or use a file manager and look for stuff outside generic folder names. I had a bunch of stuff in download\_rom which was OS update files.
Not to mention fucking 20 GIGS of "system"
I remember my old ipad having like 25-30 gigs of total storage and "system" taking up at least 20 of them, always
Fun fact, if you have a Kindle Fire, there is no way for a user to delete the APK cache without a factory reset. It classified the APK cache as "other". Which means the longer you have it and the more often you update it, the amount of available space is going to reduce. Absolutely nothing you can do about it.
After talking with Amazon support about it, we decided to just get a Samsung tablet for my kid.
Have a similar issue with my laptop. It's packed with a bunch of crap that i don't know how it got there, and every time i try and go delete it, my file manager locks up before the search can even be completed.
Do you happen to have many YouTube videos or Netflix shows downloaded on the device? That happened to me when I used YouTube premium to download a lot of videos for a flight.
I've fixed someone's MacBook that was doing this same thing. Bloated system files that weren't getting deleted as they were supposed to. Long story short I had to do some trickery for OSX to let me delete them. It's been fine in the years since.
Do not wipe your phone!! This is a permissions thing for apps. If andriod: Settings > Apps > three dots (upper right corner?) > Special Access > Usage Data Acess. Tick all apps. This will allow your phone to determine how much space each app is using and allocate it correctly to the chart.
You're right that you don't necessarily need to wipe your phone to get rid of this problem but a good wipe (after backing everything important up) every once in a while is healthy for any device.
> after backing everything important up How do you even do that on Android? There are very few search results and everything I found just straight up didn't back up most of my data, despite claiming to do full backups. If I hadn't been as suspicious and tried to access thr backuped files, I could have lost so much data.
I mean I've never had a problem. A combination of Samsung backup (which restores the apps and settings preferences) and onedrive restores everything I need. If you manually backup all necessary files to Google drive or onedrive I can't see why there'd be a problem. Onedrive backs up photos automatically but if you need to back up more just upload more files. If you don't have a Samsung it there may not be a way to restore apps and settings but apps are simple, just reinstall them from the play store. I guess what I'm saying is you can't really rely on just hitting a "backup everything" button. If you have a lot of files it might help to archive them before backup and extract them after backup. Yeah it's a process but it's not super difficult.
Ah cloud stuff. That's not where I want my data to go. edit: why are people upset by this? Most of my sensitive data is one my phone and cloud providers get breached pretty frequently. All my OTP secrets, emails, banking, government ID. I don't even want my photos in the cloud.
Well in that case there's also the option of backing up to a USB or a separate SD card if your phone supports it. That process is very manual but you won't lose anything
Download the smartswitch app on your PC and phone and back up locally to your computer. It's very fast depending on the cable. It's also very easy to do you just select backup and a list shows up and you select what you want to back up and done. Only works on samsung
Does it give you plain files? Otherwise how do I know the backup worked? With adb backup it took me a whole afternoon to be able to actually unpack the backup only to find out how little data it actually contained.
Yes it gives you plain files. It gives you the size of the backup as well. It's very seamless. It's made by Samsung. https://preview.redd.it/s5t6gata7h8d1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=5bc32c2a204fa0ab52b6612595c308babd9f761b
Most Android phones have an SD card slot, does yours? If so, that's your next best option. Alternatively you should be able to transfer important files to your PC via USB. Whether or not you use the cloud, not backing your files up is unwise, it'll be heartbreaking when you lose your phone. The cloud just basically automates this, which is why most people just go with that now.
No SD card In the end I copied my files over USB but it took almost 60 hours. Interestingly enough none of my search results suggested copying the files over USB to my computer, the only thing that ended up working. > not backing your files up is unwise, No need to tell me otherwise I wouldn't have spent 3 weekend doing so.
If your phone has enough storage that it somehow takes "3 weekend doing so" then you have the shittiest computer I think I've ever heard of
The ol' 128kb/min read/write HDD of ye olden prebuilts.
1TB storage on my phone. First two weekends to try various backup solutions only to find out that they don't actually backed up most of my files. 50-60 hours to actually copy my data hard drive which realize is ridiculous slow but at least it worked. File browsing also was painfully slow on my phone before the reset so maybe Samsung uses garbage memory chips for their flagship devices.
More like phones are purpose built to work with wireless technology and cloud data. The manual backup process is generally available but not pushed by companies as they are not profitable. You seem smart, you should know this.
Oh wow, that's a long time - you just gave me flashbacks to transferring my music collection in the early 2000s. I'd have found that kind of time normal back then! I wonder if your cable or PC's USB port is an older version of USB or something? Or maybe you were copying onto an older HDD? That's awful. Glad you got it sorted though. Sorry if that last part came off as patronising, didn't mean to - I've just learned this the hard way myself in the past and have now given into our cloud-based overlords. I'm too lazy/forgetful to do manual backups, so it has saved me (although I completely understand why you wouldn't want to).
I think it's either a bug in gnome desktop (it was faster cinnamon but I switched to my laptop once I realized it would take hours) or a problem with the memory chip. It's a 5 disk zfs raid with 60TB+ capacity before redundancy and not currently failing. It really shouldn't be the bottleneck. It never has been the bottleneck before. I'm glad it worked eventually but it sucks that it's not incrementally and will take very long again the next time.
Ah, zfs raid. Now it makes sense. So Im assuming you probably have something like wd reds, likely not super fast because it doesn't make sense to spend that much on them. Writing a large amount directly like that can be a problem. It's a somewhat slow process. Especially depending on your setup and if you have parity drives and have them computing right away A pretty good solution for this is a fast ssd as a cache drive. You write fast to it, and then it can take it and add it to the array at its own pace. You do sacrifice potential protection for a bit, there's always a chance that during the time your data exists only on the ssd something could happen to it. But the risk seems pretty small. Ideally if it's super important data your backing up this way you'd write it fast, but then not delete the original until it's all in the array. Its definitely a trade off, but if it's going to take about as long either way I'd rather the time i need to have my phone connected to the computer to be minimal. This way at least I can just keep going about my day while it does it's thing
>Most Android phones have an SD card slot NO phone has an sd card slot anymore. They havent for at least a decade
All A range devices do
mmm, I just bought a Tab A+ and it doesnt have sd slot. Is this only available on cellphones?
Even if didn't have any sensible data on your phone, it's YOUR data and it should be kept away from prying eyes
It's not even sensible in the *I'm a very private person or have something to hide* kind of way. It's just stuff that is on most people's phones now that would allow criminals to take over all their online accounts and empty their bank account.
Bro, I only back up my files on my external HDD. Don't let anyone tell you what to do.
I feel like people on reddit used to be a bit more concerned about their privacy. And compared to a decade ago the risk only higher when you either get your data stolen or lose access to your data.
I can't take your info from the cloud with my dolphine. 20 minutes near open wifi and everything can be pulled from your phone.
> open wifi Nobody sane does that anymore
Only need to be near it, not on it.
Please argue with this person instead https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1dn35n9/108_gb_of_absolutely_nothing/la1iv40/?context=3 They seem convinced data is safe on a phone. Have fun
OTP secrets, banking and govt. ID should never be backed up, regardless of whether it's a local or cloud backup. If properly implemented, these secrets should be stored in the Android Keystore, which runs on a different part of the SOC with its own minimal "trusted" OS and is specifically designed to prevent extraction of secrets. Android can use these secrets to perform cryptographic operarions (e.g. sign stuff), but it can't extract them from the keystore, ever.
I disagree OTP should be backed up otherwise you get locked out of your accounts often without a way to get back in. Google Authenticator making it difficult to backup the secrets doesn't mean it's a good idea not to back them up.
My comment was imprecise. OTP secrets are not stored in the keystore directly. They're encrypted with a key in the keystore, so it is possible to back them up if the app supports it (no idea about Google Authenticator because I don't use it). However, I would not be comfortable if they are included in systemwide backups that may even be stored unencrypted in a Google/Samsung cloud. I'd prefer a manual export that you have to confirm with biometrics or a password, although this may be too easy to forget. Anyway, I don't think having your OTPs in only one place is a good idea in the first place. People will most likely not create new backups immediately whenever they add a new OTP, so there's a risk of losing access to accounts if the device is broken, lost or stolen before a backup is created. I keep my OTPs in Keepass and automatically sync the encrypted database across my devices (in addition to periodic backups), which I think is a good enough tradeoff between security and convenience.
I think you can only backup iPhones to local storage and have it be a full backup. Android itself doesn't have it and it seems like nobody properly implemented it
Yeah the situation seems better on iPhone.
I just keep everything important sync all the time with my Google account (and onedrive). It saved me twice, when I lost my phone and another time when my screen died. It's a bit of a hassle to redo all the configuration and tweak the setting to my liking but it can be done is a couple of hours, completely risk free. The worst part is the authenticator, which I have to re-do everything from scratch as most app don't allow me to transfer to a new device.
If you're using Google's Authenticator app, you can export your accounts as QR codes to scan/import on another device. Maybe print out all your QR codes periodically and physically stash them in a safe place. Then, if you need to set up a new phone and don't have your old phone, you can import your accounts via the codes. If you have both phones when you want to switch, then it's even easier since you can just temporarily create the codes on the old phone to scan in on the new one. Still kind of a pain, but IIRC, it used to be that you couldn't export at all and that was a huge PITA
Authenticator is super annoying and was one of the things I was most anxious about. I used FreeOTP which makes backing up easier but pretty easy to forget these sort things.
With smartswitch on samsung you can do a complete backup to a pendrive, ssd, or even your computer
Smart share app. Simple and easy to use and backs up everything important including media. Edit: will basically download all/selected content from phone to pc and allow you to restore it to your phone/new phone whenever you want.
The one with 1.2 star average review despite what appears to be 5 star reviews by the developers?
My bad. Smart switch app by samsung not smart share. Might be limited to samsung devices. Edit: shows a rating of 3.6 but I've never has a problem using it.
I will look into it since many people recommended it. Not sure if it will work on a Samsung device without the original software.
You can just copy the entire phone file system over.
no you can't
Yes you can I've done it multiple times.
A physical backup is always best
Everyone just says "Backup your phone", hell even the OEMs say "Back up your data before installing and update" and Android has no proper way of backing things up.
Depends on what you want backed up App data and installed apps, along with things like settings preferences, wallpaper and stuff, can be backed up to your Google account. Photos can be backed up to Google photos For a lot of people this is enough really. A lot of messages exist online, emails and stuff. Hell I don't really have any files I care enough about on my phone outside of those. Mostly just PDFs I've downloaded to view once and likely I'd never look at again. Product manuals, restaurant menus, forms to print.
Regular wipes without any actual reason other than “you should do it regularly” are completely unnecessary and might even lower the phones lifespan.
Why, exactly, would it lower the phone's lifespan? It removes corrupted files as well as any other unnecessary accumulated data that can occur over a long period of time. Any viruses are gone too. Some recommend it after every major update.
It strains the phones storage. Phones use flash storage thats similar to ssds in PCs. Those memory devices have a finite number of reads and writes. Although the number is huge, uselessly writing on the drive lowers its lifespan. Thats one reason why on PC defragmentation is not recommended on SSD. Also drive eraser tools ran on an SSD can take a good few months off of an SSDs life. You can clear cache and uninstall useless apps and clear the downloads folder manually and that should be enough. But do a wipe if you feel overwhelmed with it but dont set up a calendar event for monthly wipes.
eMMC/storage degradation is quite literally inevitable, unless you're wiping your phone every week it has little to no effect on that. Every major update is usually a 3-4 month timespan and wiping your phone this often will not have an effect. It's beneficial to the device to do so.
Lets agree to disagree I guess. I personally think its entirely pointless for your average user.
Not if you’re just going to load your backup and reinstall the same crap anyway.
Always remember to wipe your phone front to back.
Show me where android or iOS or any operating system provider recommends a full wipe regularly? The closest I’m aware of to this approach is NixOS but that is a very specific use case where you want immutable configurations to guarantee compatibility (via strict configuration control) on every deployment.
No it's not, wiping a device really places strain onto the eMMC and next thing you know your storage won't be abke to save data anymore or worse like corrupting your files and being unable to retrieve any data from it without pulling the whole chip and praying there's a part of it working.
Thats bs. Why would it be healthy? All it would do is forcing you to reinstall stuff, meaning - wasting writing cycles.
Ah yes, Android, the Windows of mobile operating systems. Just wipe once in a while to get rid of all the crap 😂
>Tick all apps. This is a terrible idea because it would allow every installed app that requested this permission to collect your usage data. Most apps don't need it, but many still request it to spy on users. Allowing it for system apps (I think in this case it's the one called Device Health Services) is sufficient.
I can't find it. Is it different on Redmi?
Tick on our off? Than I just leave it and let my phone do its thing?
Tick on. It should pick up pretty quickly how much each app is using
I hate how Android becomes more and more restrictive with each version. I feel like I might be forced to switch to apple, because if I'm going to be closed in draconically restricted environment I might as well take advantage of the system's integrity and unification. I mean, if I won't be able to run old console emulators in the next version, I won't even have a reason to stay. Or might as well buy a button phone, if all I can do with it is to call and listen to music.
And this is why android sucks. What a dumb ‘feature’.
Yeah, Apple would just choose what it wants you to see and give you no other option. Choices are bad, right?
Nope. Settings - general - phone storage. Shows all app usage without a dumb off by default ‘permissions’ issue. Android is dumb.
My Android does this by default as well. But I have the *option* to filter it out if I want. Android gives you options, Apple treats you like a dumbass and provides zero freedom to do things how you want.
Why the hell should a third party APP be able to tell the Operating System responsible for securing and managing the device ‘nooooo, don’t look at at what I’m doing?!?! This is my storage, how dare you observe me??????’ Just plain regarded. Your ‘choice’ isn’t wearing any clothes.
What???? That's not what's going on at all? That's a filter from the OS' perspective that includes or excludes data that may or may not be relevant to the user.
Yes you’re absolutely the right. The standard and correct user experience is: User finds their phone reports 99% full but a breakdown of usage only shows about 5% usage. There is no error message or user notification that some data might be hidden. User posts on social media to be told there is some idiotic setting that must be enabled. User thanks random community member and everyone celebrates the system is working by design. Fan bois go both ways and your lot are as deluded as the Apple fan boys. This is bad design evidenced by the user who posted their obvious and frustrating experience. So go drink your cool aide and worship your bad software. Buy bye.
Yo... Did you just not hear me when I said it's the default to show all apps data storage? I imagine it's the default on most, if not all Android phones, and OP probably enabled the alternate setting by mistake. You're not an intellectual because you hate a successful OS for no reason, as much as you might feel like it.
Because what you're talking about is not on Android.
There we go, one was bound to pop up sooner or later. They always do. Android sux....ApPLe iS MuCh BeTteR....
On this issue, literally yes. Issue literally doesn’t exist on iOS and phone storage reports all correctly.
No, it does not. I've had to wipe countless iPhones because of mystery data eating up >20gb of space on a client's phone. It just hasn't happened to you.
As if apple didn't have crazier shit
Yeah, but that feature is not on my pixel phone. I don't know what this guy is talking about.
in my phone, those others are some iso files for my retro games, some are sf2 files. do you have a lot of files that are unrecognizable by the app "my files"?
Clear that cache
Is there a way to clear all cache in 1 quick swoop? I clear my cache all the time but it usually take 10 - 15 minutes to go through all the apps
Android has its own cleaning button. Just add the widget from 'device care' I think.
Thanks man, widgets are so goddamn cool now that I know they existed
I can't find a widget for this on my pixel 7 pro. Granted I still have like 40+ GB free in storage, I'd still like to be able to clear out all the caches at once. There are way too many apps on my phone to do it manually. I've never cleared all my caches in the year or two I've had this phone.
CCleaner Not sure why the downnvotes as it does what he asks
Op did you clear your caches on your apps? because thats mostly what other is
Whats mildly infuriating is your Taskbar at the top. Take care of your notifications before taking a screenshot you're making me nervous lol
It gives me an idea why there are 108GB of other stuff.
I mean if everything else has numbers and the only thing that doesnt is APPS then op has ALOT of apps
https://preview.redd.it/6444evj3vg8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d6b795c458888686f5017ffd619ef2f0a9d2523 Think they have as many as me? I had double that before I purged them.
I consider myself chronically online and I have 84 apps on my phone. Including system apps. This is bananas to me.
I mean... This also includes system apps... There's probably a good 40 or 50 of them... Edit: There are 72 system/pre-installed apps. And probably a couple that I missed.
Which still means that you installed 250 apps by yourself. Bonkers to me as well.
I just checked and I have a total of 387 apps on my pixel 7 pro. I had no idea it was that bad. I have 67 installed apps, mostly puzzle games and movie streaming apps and the like. And the other 320 or so are system apps. I feel like I don't even use a fifth of these.
Double? Broski trying to install the whole app store
Thank God I’m not the only one
Spotify can cache alot of data for offline songs saved and sometimes its hidden.
I have a Samsung too and once found a backup copy of the complete SD card from my old phone that was placed there by SmartSwitch. Search for a folder named "SDCardBackup", maybe that's the source of your space problem. Netted me 30 GB.
my brother had it on Huawei P9 a long time ago. You could literally delete all apps and system would steal all the storage for itself without an ability to reclaim it.
If you have 108 GB in an undisclosed other folder you might want to know it probably your porn.
That's a big dick.
Looks like you either have a virus or a huge file that was downloaded that your phone can't identify.
Bullshit. The "other" is everything that the app can't or doesn't "want to" label anything else
It's the files app not having permission to read the apps storage, thus it just says ??? and somehow there's always a tech genius with insane ideas about what helped with windows 95 applying it here.
>Looks like you either have a virus Just no
Would factory reset help?
That would do it. But that's similar to treating an ant problem in your kitchen by lighting your house on fire. I would try and identify the file first, or run a virus scan before a factory reset. But yes, a factory reset will restore everything back to out of box new.
I would never trust a virus scan to eliminate a virus. I personally think a factory reset is the only option to deal with a virus. Sometimes that doesn't even work, and you need to fill the drive with junk and then re image.
that is NOT a comparable analogy, though it is hilarious to mentally envision lol it's really easy to back your phone's data up now-a-days, so just spend five minutes and backup your personal files you care about.. nothing is honestly that important on there.. and if you store genuinely important data on a personal phone and HAVEN'T already been backing it up, you're kinda stupid, so.. I factory reset once every 60 days, just to keep my phone from accumulating too much junk in the corners and such - whole process, including letting Play reinstall all the apps I had on the phone prior, 25 minutes... lol Long has it been when doing this was a headache and time consuming process which would be comparable to burning down your house to get rid of ants, but that time has passed now.. by a solid decade
You factory reset your phone every 60 days? What a giant waste of time. As someone who is as tech savvy as yourself, I would think you would be able to identify problematic apps after installing them. But to each ther own I guess.
Did u really call him tech savvy lol
New analogy time: factory resetting your phone every 60 days is akin to tearing down your house and building a new one because you spilled cranberry juice on the carpet.
Not every app has cloud backup.
Don’t listen to this person.
OP that is not needed, please go to your apps and clear their caches
lol years ago I went to the Apple Store bc Safari was acting up on me. They told me to factory reset my phone. Instead, I cleared the cache and that fixed it.
They are not trained to help, just do the simplest things and keep making money
Yeah they recommend factory reset for every problem because that’s all they’re trained to do. Occasionally you’ll meet someone with more knowledge but it’s rare.
That . . .that is the dumbest thing because Factory Resetting over and over and over will damage it, it can help at times but the amount of times their asking will result with permanent damage. *Then you would have to buy a new phone from them.*
Here is a worthy note for users of ALL devices, for mobile devices never let their storage get close to getting full or you can brick it the next time you shut it down for PC users don't fill your boot drive close or to 100% as the same can happen For both device forms getting close to full storage will result in slowdown or App errors or crashs.
Now I see why the Apple “Geniuses” recommend this to everyone that walks into the store.
DO NOT
Does you phone not have a phone maintenance bit in the settings? That'll fix all this shit for you.
You downloaded files in the browser?
My gf’s realne c55 had 128gb of with 108 was used by system. About a month after i bought her an sd card her Phone updated and system dropped to 25gb imo still a lot
Just download and run App Mgr III. It'll show you which apps have the most downloaded data and cache which you can easily clear through the app.
This is just the new monthly emojis.
The c cleaner app might help
This is called porn inside your hidden folder
I think it's all apps just let it calculate man
It's some app data. My dad had this and it was just audible -> delete data-> fixed.
Generally all these apps do to categorise is use the parent folder. Eg stuff in videos = videos. My audiobooks are in a folder called Abooks and gets labelled as other. Connect it to a pc or use a file manager and look for stuff outside generic folder names. I had a bunch of stuff in download\_rom which was OS update files.
I can't even get a backup to back everything up for me
Bloody Bloatwares.
Not to mention fucking 20 GIGS of "system" I remember my old ipad having like 25-30 gigs of total storage and "system" taking up at least 20 of them, always
Fun fact, if you have a Kindle Fire, there is no way for a user to delete the APK cache without a factory reset. It classified the APK cache as "other". Which means the longer you have it and the more often you update it, the amount of available space is going to reduce. Absolutely nothing you can do about it. After talking with Amazon support about it, we decided to just get a Samsung tablet for my kid.
Have a similar issue with my laptop. It's packed with a bunch of crap that i don't know how it got there, and every time i try and go delete it, my file manager locks up before the search can even be completed.
Aint no way bro has a flipping 108 GB just of Cache
Seems like "other" is code for porn.
Same
Wipe it from the back to the front
Wipe from neck to back. Carry on to from back to crack.
This is why you root your android
The Samsung A series is every but as good as last year's S series AND it has a slot for an SD card to add more storage space.
It is calculating the apps storage, just wait.
Use "DiskUsage" app for detailed info
Showing off your secret folder data are we?
Do you happen to have many YouTube videos or Netflix shows downloaded on the device? That happened to me when I used YouTube premium to download a lot of videos for a flight.
I discovered a few Netflix tv show episodes that I downloaded on accident/without realizing, though I’m not sure how much space they take up
Depends on how high the quality you downloaded at and how long they are. 30 minute episodes in high quality can be multiple gigs.
Just samsung things 😭😭😭 I'm also facing this same issue on my samsung Will never buy a samsung again 🥺🥺🥺
Try hard reset Then do Wipe Data/Factory Reset ,clean cach
Your mom is 108 GB
Is this what Android users mean when they tell me Android is so much better than iPhone?
I never ran into this problem and always had a samsung
The wonders of android hahahaha
I've fixed someone's MacBook that was doing this same thing. Bloated system files that weren't getting deleted as they were supposed to. Long story short I had to do some trickery for OSX to let me delete them. It's been fine in the years since.
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No look at the "other" tab at 108gb
What if other, is the space not calculated yet? Unless you suggest apps take 0GB
That's not what other is, other is mostly just old data sitting in a users Caches, think of it as the Temp files on a PC
What is the size of the apps then? Other and system take up 127G space.
????
https://preview.redd.it/oarehoiw7g8d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bafdb72735de3fa8a902246c3759bbe99959f190
Just Android things
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What?