Phone Storage - remaining space going up & down for no clear reason!

[jimdriver2]

Like a lot of you, I imagine, i'm right close to the allocated space limit for the internal phone storage. With Froyo still (probably) a way off this still remains an issue.

I was wondering though how people handle being so close to the limit. My problems seem to come when I update my apps. Despite no reason for space increase when I update them I regularly lose space. Today I update a couple of apps and it pushed me over the limit, so I had to go in a find a few I don't use and remove them.

That left me with supposed about 15.5mb left, but now it's gone down to 14.95, despite no apps being added, so I can see a warning coming soon.

One thing I have noticed is that for some apps removing them completely, and then added them back again seems to gain you some space. It unfortunately is just blind luck in finding ones that will happen for, or at least it seems to be so to me.

Also very annoying is that the space you clear by deleting apps doesn't seem to correspond with what you get back. I just cleared supposedly 1.5mb of cache from the web browser, yet I only got 500kb of space back?!

Obviously i've been through all the apps and looked for any that I can clear the cache for.

So anyone got any tips?

One thing I would like to know is why the low space warning has to come at ~15mb? Seems to be i've always got that space just wasted, which is a pain as there are plenty of 200-300kb apps I could add, using just 5mb of the space.

 

[jimdriver2]

Anyone?

 

[azz]

I have same prob mate, and when that sign comes up your gmail email does not update.. pain in arse

 

[FelixofMars]

I believe from memory you need to click your home key. Then Settings>Sync. There is a bunch of sync options you can set in there for different apps. Set all the polling down to every 3 hours or so. You can also disable stocks unless your into playing the stock market.

Also I think I disabled contact sync in the 'google' section because I only need to do it now and again. Once in a while I manually run the sync.

 

[CarsnGadgets]

I think its because apps and services are caching data, and because updated apps are un packing info to the memory temporarily, so it goes up, then later the phone manages the space and it goes down again. probably wrong, but thats my guess.

 

[hal07]

i have this problem as well.
check settings -> sd card & phone storage.
phone storage is probably very low.

you will see that the apps are storing a lot of caching after long term usage and there seem to be no available cleanup apps that can do something about this irritating problem.

maybe look for alternative mail and text/MMS message apps that can be moved to SD card?

 

[LECTER]

i have this problem as well.
check settings -> sd card & phone storage.
phone storage is probably very low.

you will see that the apps are storing a lot of caching after long term usage and there seem to be no available cleanup apps that can do something about this irritating problem.

I use this:

Quick App Clean Cache - Android app on AppBrain

 

[kartnite]

I have been noticing this problem, too. Fluctuating phone-memory.

Clearing the cache doesn't seem to help all that much.

 

[hal07]

entering settins > applications > admin applications > menubutton > sort by size
i see that my contacts take 25.55mb. i wonder if its because of facebook sync saving profile pictures.

 

[SUroot]

probably.

 

[StevenSeed]

entering settins > applications > admin applications > sort by size
i see that my contacts take 25.55mb. i wonder if its because of facebook sync saving profile pictures.

Thank you hal07 - I didn't know about the sort by size feature - it's just saved me a lot of time!

 

[jimdriver2]

There's a bug with Facebook sync and contacts, and it's still in 2.2.

If you remove the FB account, then add it again and resync you'll have wasted space in your Contacts memory, maybe as much as double the amount the Facebook part needs.

The only way to sort it is to back up your contact info to a file and then wipe all contacts data, phone records and facebook sync'd people records. Then start afresh using your backup file.

I saved myself a good 5mb doing it. I've 400 facebook contacts on my phone and 100 or so linked to phone contacts, and my contacts size is <10mb.