Phone running out of space but don't know how.

[redrosealways]

My phone is running out of space (119/128GB used) but it's not showing me where. I went into the storage menu and added up the videos, photos, apps, etc in the catagories but it's not adding up remotely close to the 119GB it claims is used up. I have a 500GB sd card that I keep most things on to avoid this mess and if I run out of space on the phone, it's not going to run. Where is the space being taken up, how can I fix this? It's so frustrating.

 

[Hadron]

That storage menu is useless: it's just telling you about a few types of file, and not telling you about anything that doesn't fall into those categories. Does the "advanced" option tell you anything more useful?

Otherwise you could try installing something that will give you a more detailed picture of where storage is being used, such as DiskUsage (an app that gives a rather detailed, hierarchical view of your storage). Note that what you will be able to see with an app like that will still come to less than 128 GB, since it won't be able to examine the various system software partitions. I don't know how much space they will take on an S10, but I'll be surprised if it isn't 15-20 GB (Samsung tend not to skimp on how much space they reserve for themselves). There's a tiny little app called Storage Truth you could try if you wanted to see how much space you really have available (though that may tell you in binary units, whereas it looks like your menu is using decimal (binary GB are 7% larger than decimal GB, so the storage appears smaller in binary than in decimal).

As for where, it's hard to guess on the basis of that display. It could be in app caches, or any type of data file that your system didn't think of (e.g. if you downloaded detailed maps of the whole world my guess is that that menu wouldn't know what to say and would say nothing). I will say that "apps 0 MB" is very odd though: I don't see how you would achieve that, especially with a Samsung flagship, so that bothers me a bit. There are some nasty possibilities, e.g. we occasionally meet people who have bought "fake" phones (from random internet sellers, private individuals, Chinese budget stores, not from their service provider or big established sellers), but those are relatively rare so let's not worry about that unless we have reason to. I'd say try a third party storage analyser like DiskUsage and see what it says about the phone.

(If I've worried you by mentioning fake phones, here's a simple check: have you ever received a system update? Fakes essentially never get these, so if you have you can probably relax!)

 

[puppykickr]

Move all your pics and other medisla to the SD card.
That is what it is for.

As far as the rest, it is most likely apps.
If you have social media apps, I would look at those first.

You can get onto those sites with your browser, and get rid of the apps altogether.

 

[Hadron]

But even Facebook, who are notorious resource hogs, are not going to cache 80 GB or so of data, which is the level of mismatch here once we allow for the possible size of the system partitions. And we can see that images + video add up to about 16 GB, which is a long way short of what's missing, so while that would buy time it's not where the problem is. And if it's apps then Samsung's storage menu is badly broken, because it claims that apps are using no space at all (which, as I say, is so implausible that I'm sure there is something broken there).

 

[redrosealways]

That storage menu is useless: it's just telling you about a few types of file, and not telling you about anything that doesn't fall into those categories. Does the "advanced" option tell you anything more useful?

Otherwise you could try installing something that will give you a more detailed picture of where storage is being used, such as DiskUsage (an app that gives a rather detailed, hierarchical view of your storage). Note that what you will be able to see with an app like that will still come to less than 128 GB, since it won't be able to examine the various system software partitions. I don't know how much space they will take on an S10, but I'll be surprised if it isn't 15-20 GB (Samsung tend not to skimp on how much space they reserve for themselves). There's a tiny little app called Storage Truth you could try if you wanted to see how much space you really have available (though that may tell you in binary units, whereas it looks like your menu is using decimal (binary GB are 7% larger than decimal GB, so the storage appears smaller in binary than in decimal).

As for where, it's hard to guess on the basis of that display. It could be in app caches, or any type of data file that your system didn't think of (e.g. if you downloaded detailed maps of the whole world my guess is that that menu wouldn't know what to say and would say nothing). I will say that "apps 0 MB" is very odd though: I don't see how you would achieve that, especially with a Samsung flagship, so that bothers me a bit. There are some nasty possibilities, e.g. we occasionally meet people who have bought "fake" phones (from random internet sellers, private individuals, Chinese budget stores, not from their service provider or big established sellers), but those are relatively rare so let's not worry about that unless we have reason to. I'd say try a third party storage analyser like DiskUsage and see what it says about the phone.

(If I've worried you by mentioning fake phones, here's a simple check: have you ever received a system update? Fakes essentially never get these, so if you have you can probably relax!)

Thank you for this amazing reply! It's definitely not a fake phone because of where I bought it from and the fact I get the updates. I tried the diskuage app but it only works on sd cards and won't give me internal data. I found another though and that is eye opening. It appears that I'm only using around 52.27GB in actual data on the phone as I'd planned, as other posters didn't read that I already store my media on the 500 gb card. Android seems to have hijacked the rest. I am so careful to have it restart itself every day so I can avoid issues and not have to restore it ever because I purposely don't want to update the os past where it has been on 10 the last year and if it do restore it, I'll be stuck with os 11 and features I don't want changed.

 

[Hadron]

Actually DiskUsage does work on the internal storage, but it may mislabel it as "Storage Card". This is because of a historical decision Google took almost a decade ago that "/sdcard" would point to the user-readable part of the internal storage (to avoid breaking old, badly-coded apps. Google would have saved a lot of confusion and had a cleaner system if they'd just forced those developers to update their apps, but Google make many bad decisions...). My phone doesn't have a microSD card, and the app works fine for me.

But OK, those shots seem to show us something. You have a /data partition of 108 GB, also addressable as /storage/emulated/0. That is where your data live, but also apps' private data, apps themselves and updates to system apps (the original system app lives in the /system partition). I don't know what app you used, so I can only guess at the interpretation of some parts of those plots. But it looks like whatever app it is can only see about half of what's using your storage. The obvious guess there is that the rest is apps and their private data (it's obvious that your system menu was being misleading when it said Apps = 0 MB), as the other member said - my disagreement there was that social media alone could account for this, not that apps might not be responsible for a lot of it. So it would be worth going into System > Apps (I think Samsung rename that "App Manager", or at any rate they used to) and seeing which are the big storage users. This used to be easy, as you could tell it to sort apps by size, but Google have made it progressively harder (on Android 11 the size it shows before you click on the app doesn't include the app's cache, so may underestimate storage use by hundreds of MB per app. As I say, Google make many bad decisions). If you find apps that you don't need and which are using a lot of storage you can remove them. If they are pre-installed apps you won't be able to remove them but you can (usually) clear their storage, uninstall updates and disable them (the system should stop you disabling anything really important - though I've known Samsung use that to protect pure junk apps that they bundled as well...).

I'm hoping that will deal with some of the "missing" storage, i.e. space that is being used which doesn't show in those plots. Then there's the rest, which I think is an analysis of the files in the part of your internal storage which you can browse with a file browser. It looks like 22GB of that is in the "Android" folder, which is actually also app data of different sorts - I don't recommend deleting stuff from there manually (even if it will let you), unless you can see that there is stiff left behind by apps that have been uninstalled, because it's likely to break apps. Better to manage such things through the system settings. After that it seems that AutoDesk is your biggest single user. I don't know whether that app can show you information on the unlabelled parts of the diagram. But it seems likely that you have some folders in your internal storage that are using a fair amount of space, so it's worth checking whether any of them are unneeded (when an app creates a folder in the internal storage it is usually not removed when you uninstall the app).

I'm usually reluctant to recommend cleaning apps, partly because most of them are scammy adware and often contain features that are detrimental (e.g. task killers, which claim to speed the system, free up RAM, improve battery performance, etc, when they actually slow the system and use more energy, and the idea that you want a lot of free RAM is a gross misunderstanding of how the operating system works). But there is one I'll sometimes recommend looking at, called SD Maid. That has features for identifying data that have been left behind by apps that have been removed, which may be useful. But use it with extreme care: it may well offer to clean up stuff that you don't actually want to remove, so I'd always check item-by-item before allowing it to do anything. But even if you don't allow it to remove anything itself and just use a file browser it may help you identify things or give an idea of the scale of any issue.

 

[redrosealways]

Actually DiskUsage does work on the internal storage, but it may mislabel it as "Storage Card". This is because of a historical decision Google took almost a decade ago that "/sdcard" would point to the user-readable part of the internal storage (to avoid breaking old, badly-coded apps. Google would have saved a lot of confusion and had a cleaner system if they'd just forced those developers to update their apps, but Google make many bad decisions...). My phone doesn't have a microSD card, and the app works fine for me.

But OK, those shots seem to show us something. You have a /data partition of 108 GB, also addressable as /storage/emulated/0. That is where your data live, but also apps' private data, apps themselves and updates to system apps (the original system app lives in the /system partition). I don't know what app you used, so I can only guess at the interpretation of some parts of those plots. But it looks like whatever app it is can only see about half of what's using your storage. The obvious guess there is that the rest is apps and their private data (it's obvious that your system menu was being misleading when it said Apps = 0 MB), as the other member said - my disagreement there was that social media alone could account for this, not that apps might not be responsible for a lot of it. So it would be worth going into System > Apps (I think Samsung rename that "App Manager", or at any rate they used to) and seeing which are the big storage users. This used to be easy, as you could tell it to sort apps by size, but Google have made it progressively harder (on Android 11 the size it shows before you click on the app doesn't include the app's cache, so may underestimate storage use by hundreds of MB per app. As I say, Google make many bad decisions). If you find apps that you don't need and which are using a lot of storage you can remove them. If they are pre-installed apps you won't be able to remove them but you can (usually) clear their storage, uninstall updates and disable them (the system should stop you disabling anything really important - though I've known Samsung use that to protect pure junk apps that they bundled as well...).

I'm hoping that will deal with some of the "missing" storage, i.e. space that is being used which doesn't show in those plots. Then there's the rest, which I think is an analysis of the files in the part of your internal storage which you can browse with a file browser. It looks like 22GB of that is in the "Android" folder, which is actually also app data of different sorts - I don't recommend deleting stuff from there manually (even if it will let you), unless you can see that there is stiff left behind by apps that have been uninstalled, because it's likely to break apps. Better to manage such things through the system settings. After that it seems that AutoDesk is your biggest single user. I don't know whether that app can show you information on the unlabelled parts of the diagram. But it seems likely that you have some folders in your internal storage that are using a fair amount of space, so it's worth checking whether any of them are unneeded (when an app creates a folder in the internal storage it is usually not removed when you uninstall the app).

I'm usually reluctant to recommend cleaning apps, partly because most of them are scammy adware and often contain features that are detrimental (e.g. task killers, which claim to speed the system, free up RAM, improve battery performance, etc, when they actually slow the system and use more energy, and the idea that you want a lot of free RAM is a gross misunderstanding of how the operating system works). But there is one I'll sometimes recommend looking at, called SD Maid. That has features for identifying data that have been left behind by apps that have been removed, which may be useful. But use it with extreme care: it may well offer to clean up stuff that you don't actually want to remove, so I'd always check item-by-item before allowing it to do anything. But even if you don't allow it to remove anything itself and just use a file browser it may help you identify things or give an idea of the scale of any issue.

Thank you for telling me that! I reinstalled the diskusage app and it is beautiful! What a wonderful app!!!

I definitely agree about Google. I switched from 10 years of apple iphone because I wanted more freedom on my phone and I seem to lose more and more freedom and features with each new google android os update — why I gesture the back button every morning when my phone restarts and I open my phone for the first time to not install the OS 11 update.

 

[Hadron]

Wow, you have 8.8 GB of cache in Firefox! Well that's an easy win: go into your settings and clear the cache for that app!

System updates are a mixed bag. For example, it is an improvement that you can selectively deny some permissions to (most) apps, whereas a decade ago you had to check what permissions the app had and then either accept them all or not install the app. However this only applies to permissions which Google consider "sensitive", and naturally there are others I'd like to be able to restrict. But the flip side of that is that you have to put much more effort in to see the permissions, making it easier for people to blindly install apps without thinking of this (which probably helps Google commercially, but in my opinion encourages poor security practices as well as making it harder for those of a more cautious bent to perform due diligence).

 

[puppykickr]

Looking at the pics, I see that 80GB are used by apps.

Notice how FireFox alone is using almost 10GB?
That seems excessive as all get out to me.

YouCut is using 5GB+?
Also huge for that app.

My guess is that you have gigantic app caches and tons of data in your apps thst needs to be cleared.

For reference, none of my browsers are at 300MB, and my YouCut is below 100MB.

YouCut does not even hsve any personal settings to adjust, so if you have moved all your videos out of it and put them onto the SD card, I can't see what other data it has been collecting.

Do you block the ads on it by using a firewall?
I know I do.

 

[jessicamariel]

Try moving your files to your SD card to free up the space on your phone.