Help "Low on space" phone/application storage notification

[AnotherHiggins]

@bird jam: I did a factory reset to solve this problem on the first weekend in August - less than 3 months after getting the phone and before FroYo was rolled out OTA. (Here's the thread I started about it which is how I know when I did the reset.)

It's been just over 4 months since then and I haven't seen the message again. Then again, I've done a couple more factory resets since then for other reasons. Still, I currently have 197 apps on my phone, none of which are on the SD card and I don't have this error message.

I was really sweating the factory reset, but it actually wasn't so bad.

I used Astro to back up my apps, Moved all contacts from "phone" to my main gmail account (Let me know if you need help with this), saved over all pictures, songs and sounds to my desktop, and backed up all my text and picture msgs with SMS Backup +.

In fact, it was kind of fun to start from scratch again - like getting a new phone; It was even faster after the factory reset.

As it turned out, I wound up not reinstalling several of the apps that I had before the reset. But I've since replaced them with a slew of new apps to tinker with.

 

[campuscop2003]

I have been trying to download the talking santa app for my kids via the market. It keeps telling me "sorry, theres not enough space to install this item"


Available memory:
SD Card 25.84GB

Internal phone storage: 4.77GB

Phone Memory: 538MB

I can't figure out the problem. Theres no way I am out of space with those numbers?!?!?!?!?

 

[NightAngel79]

I have a good amount of apps and have deleted many of them and moved some to the SD card, but the "Low on Space" symbol is still there...

If I delete the cache for GMAIL or FaceBook, how would that affect my accounts?

Thank you for the help!

Deleting cache won't hurt anything, if you delete data on any app it will erase your account, settings, etc.

I had large data on my fantasy football app, erased data and message went away. Also made message go away from deleting data on wallpaper app once... HTC mail app is notorious for this as well, you will have to re add your account if you do this though

 

[BornMountaineer]

if this hasnt been said in this thread, make sure you DO NOT sync your Facebook contacts, you will probably have thousands of contacts for facebook under people and the contact storage number will grow to an outrageous size. Facebook for Sense is all you need to sync your contacts will

I manually synched my phone book to my facebook. Should I not have done this? How is this done through sense? I'm not sure what the difference is.

Thanks.

 

[DizkoDan]

IIRC there's only like 150MB available to applications. You might want to try moving some of the apps to SD to free up some disk space. You can do this by going to settings->applications->manage applications. click on an app and click move to sd card if it's not greyed out.

 

[pdykstra]

ive noticed that if i clear any picture messages i get the error goes away. just end up saving the pics on my sd card but still a pain to constantly do

yep, this is what always fixes it for me. the problem only comes up when I have a large number of txt messages and picture messages saved. once the txt message crash bug strikes and erases all my messages, this issue doesn't come back again for a long time until my inbox gets large again.

 

[Smabbage]

In the words of Adam Whitney Savage, "Well, here's your problem."

Check out this post and beta .apk.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=853001

 

[NightAngel79]

In the words of Adam Whitney Savage, "Well, here's your problem."

Check out this post and beta .apk.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=853001

only for rooted phones though

 

[Smabbage]

True. Hopefully most have taken the plunge by now.

 

[NightAngel79]

True. Hopefully most have taken the plunge by now.

Well i haven't but that project their working on hopefully progresses far.

 

[Skorpios1027]

I have tried this and it is working for me. I moved my biggest space hog's (Pandora) files to /emmc and now have half of my /data/data space free again. Pandora still works. Not a perfect solution, there are some things that will not work when moved, but for now it is workable for me.

 

[bird jam]

I used Astro to back up my apps, Moved all contacts from "phone" to my main gmail account (Let me know if you need help with this), saved over all pictures, songs and sounds to my desktop, and backed up all my text and picture msgs with SMS Backup +.

Yes, please tell me how to maintain all my contacts through a factory reset.

I have had enough of this. I just got two text messages from my wife that I can't open and I have cleared out all the data and caches that I can. This is really ridiculous. I have loads of free space. I don't even have that many apps.

I guess it's time to take the plunge and factory reset this thing. So frustrating. I really did love this phone up until this crap started a few weeks ago.

 

[howarmat]

to transfer your contacts to your google account from some other account

1) go to people
2) import/export
3) export to SD card
4) select the account that you want to export
5) confirm
6) import/export
7) import from SD Card
8) select google
9) it searches for a minute
10) select "import one vCard'
11) Select the file you just created before
12) should be done.
13) make sure your google account now has the contacts
14) now you can uncheck the "phone" contacts to avoid duplicates
15) from people app select "View"
16) uncheck phone and then done.
17) should be done with transfer and not should duplicates


and from here out make sure when creating a contact that you put it under the "Google" account

 

[gobirds895]

What should i do to attempt a fix, the notification is concerning, and I cant download any music, even after I deleted several apps and songs..According to SD/Phone storage i have more than enough space everywhere. Whats the most likely cause, too many apps, songs, pictures, or actual 'app data' saved to specific apps?

 

[red97xj]

Does any one know what the full text of the 'Low on Space' error message is? When in landscape, the most I can see is, "Application data space is low. To free up space please 1. Go to mail app and..."

What is the rest? I can't find it anywhere.

Use your track ball to go down and highlight it, then just leave it highlighted, it will start to scroll across.

 

[benomix]

this problem finally temporarily bricked my phone at the end of last week. i had, not just one, but two simultaneous low application disk space icons in my notification bar. i tried to power cycle my phone. after that, it would not boot, it just kept cycling through the htc and verizon "droid" screens. i tried removing the battery to fix the problem since that usually solves problems like this; but that did not work. i had to do hard reset to get it working again.

 

[Joshuahist]

bad post

 

[heatsink]

I keep getting this low on space message too. Whenever I clear out some of the app's caches it goes away for a few minutes and then comes right back.
I also get a low on file space warning now whenever I get a text message with an attachment. So it won't download the attachment.
Here are my memory stats as of right now on my Incredible:
SD: 6.48 GB free (8GB sd card)
Phone: 6.26 GB free
Phone memory available: 521MB

Can anyone help? The low space icon was an annoyance, but now something is affecting my ability to receive data. Plus it won't let me update some apps without the available space (which I know I have!)

 

[CramRazz]

I think that this is an HTC Sense and HTC application issue. I was experiencing these problems until I rooted and flashed a Vanilla Android ROM. I'm thinking that received data is slowly leaking from wherever HTC's (poorly tested) apps store it into your app memory space.

 

[Deleted User]

Well, im low on disk space again! The icon keeps coming up every day or every other day! Each time it comes up, I clear data on certain apps, and I uninstall some apps from my phone! I've removed Twitter, Reuters News and Jewels in the last week.. Icon leaves but comes back few days later! And I have a lot of space on my phone by the way!

Getting really frustrating.

]

I had the same problem. Never understood why since I deleted all my text messages. Did a hard reset and it solved my problem.

Got the error back Monday night after pushing a few pictures up to facebook. Again, deleted all text messages but error continued to pop up.

I went back to look at facebook since it was the last app I used before seeing the problem. Opened application manager and deleted Facebook data. Error gone!

I re-logged into facebook and everything is sync'ed again, but no return of error.

My guess is that it has something to do with using SMS to transmit facebook updates and pictures?

 

[emmur0]

any updates on a good fix for this problem?

 

[Smabbage]

If you have root see post #64 above.

 

[NightAngel79]

Seems to have something to do with program data specifically and how/where it is stored. I believe it has been said that program data is stored in a separate, much smaller location

 

[heatsink]

Well I did notice that I had a huge amount of text messages that I never deleted. I got rid of all of them and the warning went away.
It's only been a day since I did that, so we'll see if it comes back. But so far, so good.

 

[hudss]

Iwas going crazy myself and had rest my device and had it replaced. Only for the low memory to eventually return...Even though I had way enough space..

My solution (for rooted users) is to use root explorer and delete all of the root /cache contents. It contains a buch of temp files from market downloads..download-1.apk / download-2.apk..etc It seems to fill up when an update or install fails.

None of the cache apps I tried would remove it without doing it manually with a file manager.

I had way over 100mb of data in there. Hasn't come back since..been over a month now and I have only 327mb free.

My own theory is I believe a hard reset would fix the device for a bit since it clears that cache temp folder, but will return as it did for me. Cleaning app cache is a more of a bandaid fix since it will fill up again.