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System taking too much memory - Galaxy Note 9 -

Lyon_

Lurker
Feb 25, 2019
8
0
Hi there,

First of all, sorry because English is not my mother tongue. I will try to explain my problem here as well as I can but I say sorry in advance for any error that I could make when writing this post here.

Few days ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. I barely have used it but after few days I realised that nearly 50Gb (49.3 Gb) are already taken by "System/user data" according to what it is specified in the "Device care" storage options of the phone.

As I said, I have had no time to use the device yet apart from receiving a pair of calls with it and trying to install the F-Droid application. The day when I installed F-Droid I downloaded from there the Termux terminal to check if I could be able to check the F-Droid apk agaisnt the signature to verify the download.

One of the days I began to receive notifications for uploading the system. I received many of these and I proceeded to allow all of them. There was a moment when I had the impression that the notifications were too many and when I began to read them carefully I noticed that some of them were similar to the previous ones. Notifications continued but I stopped to allow them. By then the display of the device has changed. I think this was due to the change from Android Oreo to Pie.

Some time after I realised about the problem that I mention here. I have not saved any content to the phone yet (no photos, no videos, even I have not set my email there yet).

I tried to use reset the mobile to its factory settings. I had no worries of doing that because as I said I had nothing yet important on my phone. After trying that a pair of times the problem of the memory was still there.

I have tried to use CCleaner and LTE CLeaner to solve the problem without any success. I have tried to dial *#9900# on the phone and then select from menu - delete dumpstate/logcat as proposed here: https://androidforums.com/threads/low-on-space-system-data-huge.278837/ but nothing changed.

The other solution that I read and that I have not tried yet is to root the phone and manually trying to find and delete the files which many be taking the storage, however I am hesitant to do so because I have no experience at all and it is a brand new and expensive phone as you know. I feel bad thinking about trying to root and solve this problem by myself and voiding completely the guarantee of my device.

I am still in the period of 15 days in which I can return the phone according the law for protecting customers of my country, however I am afraid that if I go back to the store from where I bought the device and ask for a change to a new Note 9 they might tell me that everything is just my fault for having installed some apps from outside the Google and Samsung official apps stores.

Do you think I am already out of guarantee for just installing F-Droid and Termux?

Could you give me some advice about how to deal with this issue? Do you think is it possible to solve this problem without rooting the device?


Thank you very much for your help.
 
Last edited:
Few days ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. I barely have used it but after few days I realised that nearly 50Gb (49.3 Gb) are already taken by "System/user data" according to what it is specified in the "Device care" storage options of the phone.

50GB seems excessive even with the original firmware and a pending OS update. User data would be the partition which stores user and app information with the exception of protected data. If you factory reset an unrooted device it should wipe the user partition. If you go to settings>storage>internal does it not list the biggest users of data?
 
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50GB seems excessive even with the original firmware and a pending OS update. User data would be the partition which stores user and app information with the exception of protected data. If you factory reset an unrooted device it should wipe the user partition. If you go to settings>storage>internal does it not list the biggest users of data?


Hi, thank you very much for your answer.

I cannot find any significant content in the device, just the few pdfs that I have already downloaded (4 pdfs of less than 10 pages each) and the biggest archive that I find is a preinstalled mp3 of 4,65MB that was already in the phone.

I upload here some pics for providing some insight about my situation:


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First thing, I've merged the post from the other thread here, so we can keep everything together.

Just so we're on the same page, this is the Galaxy Note 9 with 512 GB of memory/ 8GB of RAM? Do you have a microsd card inserted because the numbers in your screen shot add up to exactly 512 GB.

I think this is more a misunderstanding of how Samsung decided to report memory. First, 512 GB is the TOTAL raw memory installed in the phone, after formatting and partitioning you will lose a good chunk of that tot he system and, given that the phone measures memory in binary figures but manufacturers report in base-10 there's going to be a good bit of a difference between what you think you have and what you actually have. You can read the specifics here.

Now that I see the screenshot, that 48GB listed as "other" is your system, recovery and cache partitions. Given that the rom size of this Note 9 is pretty big to begin with, I don't think there's going to be much you can do to 'recover' that storage.
 
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First thing, I've merged the post from the other thread here, so we can keep everything together.

Just so we're on the same page, this is the Galaxy Note 9 with 512 GB of memory/ 8GB of RAM? Do you have a microsd card inserted because the numbers in your screen shot add up to exactly 512 GB.

I think this is more a misunderstanding of how Samsung decided to report memory. First, 512 GB is the TOTAL raw memory installed in the phone, after formatting and partitioning you will lose a good chunk of that tot he system and, given that the phone measures memory in binary figures but manufacturers report in base-10 there's going to be a good bit of a difference between what you think you have and what you actually have. You can read the specifics here.

Now that I see the screenshot, that 48GB listed as "other" is your system, recovery and cache partitions. Given that the rom size of this Note 9 is pretty big to begin with, I don't think there's going to be much you can do to 'recover' that storage.


Hi Lunatic59,

Ok, if you think it is normal then I am quiet. To me it just seemed too much storage without me having personally used any significant part of it.

Thank you very much for your help. I do appreciate it, seriously :)
 
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If anyone else has the 512GB version they would be able to confirm whether this is normal.

The space needed for the system should not depend at all on the amount of storage installed, but I have previously seen people report Samsung using larger system partitions on high capacity phones, so it could well be normal for this model. If it's like this immediately after a factory reset then I think it's fair to assume that this is just the way the phone is.

For what it's worth, this doesn't mean that the system software takes up almost 50GB. This will be the size of the system partitions - it won't tell you how much empty space there is in those, and since you can't access it it makes no difference really (which is why it counts the whole partition as used).
 
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Not that this will help you, but something you should know anyways. Considering android is basically linux, just use the df command to check partition sizes, used space, and leftover space.

With your phone plugged into your pc run the following adb commands...
Bash:
adb devices
adb shell
df -h

As you can see from the screen shot my system partition is 3.4gb, system used 1gb, and have 2.3gb left.
 

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