Have you freed up space on your phone? 9 October 2017 at 7:30PM edited 15 October 2019 at 2:17PM in Mobiles 59 replies 16.1K views

MSE_Kelvin

This is the dedicated discussion thread for our new guide:

How to increase phone storage

Thanks to all forumites below who helped with it.

Click reply below to discuss the guide. If you haven't already, join the forum to reply.

Back to the original post...

Hello forumites,

MSE Kelvin here doing some research for a new guide we're doing on freeing up memory on your mobile phone without spending any money, ie, upgrading to a phone with more capacity or paying for online storage.

Have you managed to save GBs by uploading your photos and videos to a free online platform, clearing your app caches or doing something else that few people know how to do? If so we'd love to hear from you.

All we need to know is roughly how much memory you freed up and what you did to free it up. Anyone whose replies we use will of course get a shout out in the guide!

Thanks in advance for your help,

MSE Kelvin

Browntoa

back up all photo's , videos , documents and downloads to Google photos or google drive which are both free


google photos will do it automatically for you


empty cache on the phones storage (android) on a regular basis


first time freed up 1.8 gb

MSE_Kelvin

Cheers Browntoa, much appreciated!

esuhl

My old Samsung Galaxy S2 was running a very old version of Android, which was slow and came with bloatware. I installed LineageOS custom firmware to replace it. The installation size is quite large, so I repartitioned the system using Lanchon REPIT:

https://github.com/Lanchon/REPIT

I used this filename:

lanchon-repit-20160923-system=1G-data=same-sdcard=max-preload=min+wipe-i9100.zip

That then left enough space to install LineageOS and GApps (Google Apps).

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You ought to have a look at Apps2SD. Android phones only allow you to install apps in a small area of protected memory. On my old Samsung Galaxy S2, this is 2GB.

Apps2SD allows you to move apps to the SD card. Unlike Android's the built-in "move to SD card", this can actually move all app data to the SD card.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.co.pricealert.apps2sd

So, with a 32GB micro-SD card, I can install a huge number of apps.

All the above requires root access and a custom recovery, but that's pretty straightforward.

[Deleted User]

Start by uninstalling any bloatware you don't need and that'll allow itself to be removed. If you can't remove it you can usually at least freeze it which will save a little bit of space on updates.

JJ_Egan

Freed up space no as i dont need to .
Note 3 running custom Note 7 firmware .

indesisiv

I've stopped having to do this with the more modern phones with lots of storage.

Personally I just move music, videos, photos to the SD card. Leaves loads of room for everything else on the phone then.

In saying that I only have 8 GB worth of apps and 14GB in system. So have 40GB free there. But I do have 45GB of stuff on my SD card.

Most of my photos and videos are backed up to cloud storage too.

MSE_Kelvin

Thanks for getting involved, Colin_Maybe.

Have you uninstalled/frozen bloatware on your own phone? How much space did you manage to save?

[Deleted User]

MSE_Kelvin wrote: »

Thanks for getting involved, Colin_Maybe.

Have you uninstalled/frozen bloatware on your own phone? How much space did you manage to save?

Lol, sorry Kelvin, my memories not that good. It would vary too much anyway depending on phone and/or user for it to make much sense.

oldagetraveller

My phone is virually stock Android and no bloatware.
There is a micro sd card installed and all the stuff possible is saved automatically to that in spite of the phone having 32gb of internal memory.
However, I do transfer photos etc. from the phone, to a laptop p.c., via Bluetooth.
I would just keep them stored in the phone but wouldn't want to lose some pictures if the phone let the smoke out! That really is the only reaon why memory is freed up, otherwise not necessary.

PasturesNew

I doubt that'd work on my Nokia 6310.