Root "Application Data Space is Low" - Unbelievable Find! [**ROOT**]

[Bob Denny]

I have been wrestling with ever-increasing usage of /data/data in my HTC Incredible phone. It is limited to 140MB. Like many others, I got "Application data space is low" and I'm down to 14MB. I looked around and found that my Contact Storage which I recalled was about 30Mb (for 450 or so contacts) had bloated to 70MB, but I haven't added more than 5 or 10 contacts in the last couple of months. Hardly enough to have used 36MB more!

During one of my nandroid backups, I noticed that, during backup of 'datadata' I saw "billions" of files called thumbnail_photo_nnnnn.jpg zipping by on the nandroid display. Over half of the thermometer movement for 'datadata' was these things! I strongly suspect a runaway app has left that s**t out there. So I went looking with ADB Shell > su ... Found'em! The thumbnails are located in

/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/files

Every file in that dir is a thumbnail_photo_nnnnn.jpg file. There were thousands, and each was about 7-10Kb. I have 400 contacts, so WTF? I had a nandroid backup, so I just deleted them all. OK, no more cute pix of my contacts, BFD. I got back 40+ Mb of /data/data space!!!

Here's my theory: The bloat is a result of the Facebook Sync, in which FB friends' profile pix are stored for contacts. Now over time, your FB contacts will change their profile pix. When an HTC contact gets a new profile pic by syncing with FB, the old one isn't deleted. Eventually those fossil profile pix will use up your precious /data/data partition!

I'll post here again after a few weeks to see how much space a fresh load of synced profile pix takes up. For now, though, I have freed up 40+ MB, almost 30% of my /data/data space! ** HUZZAH **

 

[iowabowtech]

Interesting. I don't use Facebook and only had a couple pics in said location. Both were pics from Google contacts...basically their avatars. So add those to the mix as pics in this locale also.

 

[Hand76]

Hmmm good find. I have always cleared my contact storage data in manage applications but I do seem to have some old files in this folder taking up space. Will go and delete a bunch and wait for facebook to rebuild the new files and see how much space I save.

 

[itbedave]

And this is why clearing your Facebook cache every once in awhile relieves the low storage issue. It probably clears out all of those old ones and updates with only the current ones.