Internal Phone Storage is Getting Low

**mcp6530** · 04-04-2011, 02:15 PM

Apparently several apps cannot be moved to my SD Card for some reason. The ones I can't move are left on the phone and my phone is almost full so I have a perpetual red icon in my notification bar that says my phone is almost full and delete some apps. Ugh!

Anyone know of a fix for this or do you know why some apps can't be moved to SD card?

**mike340t** · 04-04-2011, 06:14 PM

some apps require constant access from boot... such as widgets and things that display stats, mess with settings, etc and thus will not work from an SD card... I have 81 apps saved to my phone memory including some system apps and still have room... sounds like you just might need to do some spring cleaning

**mcp6530** · 04-05-2011, 10:47 AM

I was afraid someone would say that!

**adlebo** · 07-27-2011, 12:49 PM

I'm having a frustrating issue. My phone is giving me the phone storage getting low message. But when I checked out "apps to sd" I calculated all apps that are on my phone itself and it amounts to about 250 MB. So why is it showing that I'm using 457 MB? I cleared all cache and everything. I'm confused. Please help, that little red card notification is driving me up the wall!

**adlebo** · 07-27-2011, 12:52 PM

Plus the notification happened when I downloaded the netflix app. But I moved it right away to sd, so why is it still low?

**Paul627g** · 07-27-2011, 02:18 PM

Do you have a big amount of text messages stored in your device? This sounds strange but I've answered posts here before where users had over 1000 txt msgs saved and wondered why they were getting low on memory or their phone was running slow... they did some house cleaning and things got better.

**adlebo** · 07-27-2011, 09:12 PM

Originally Posted by Paul627g

Do you have a big amount of text messages stored in your device? This sounds strange but I've answered posts here before where users had over 1000 txt msgs saved and wondered why they were getting low on memory or their phone was running slow... they did some house cleaning and things got better.

I deleted all text messages and call logs but didn't get to far. I read somewhere that a hard reset can help. Does that make sense?

**amwworks** · 08-03-2011, 11:16 PM

Originally Posted by adlebo

I'm having a frustrating issue. My phone is giving me the phone storage getting low message. But when I checked out "apps to sd" I calculated all apps that are on my phone itself and it amounts to about 250 MB. So why is it showing that I'm using 457 MB? I cleared all cache and everything. I'm confused. Please help, that little red card notification is driving me up the wall!

What rom are you running? I had this problem on EG22 but not on EF02. I swiched back to ACS 1.2 EC02 and I havn't had the problem since. I have about 42MB left.

**adlebo** · 09-15-2011, 06:51 PM

I'm running rooted stock froyo. I'm still having the "low on space" notification problem. It really doesn't make sense, my apps on the phone do not amount to too much. I want to make a factory reset to see if that helps but will that remove root?

**Galane** · 09-20-2011, 03:09 AM

Have you also deleted your text message and e-mail logs? Got a bunch of picture mails? What about photos in internal memory? Ringtones and music? Put them all on the card.

Just have to remember that when mounted as USB Mass Storage, nothing on the card is accessible to the phone, so any contact you have a custom ringtone for on the card will use the default ring as long as the phone is being used as storage for your computer.

**bfguns** · 09-20-2011, 10:51 AM

where is the actual directory of where your text messages are stored?

**boyziggy** · 12-25-2011, 09:46 PM

It's impossible to clear space from your android phone. You can wipe it clean. That's about it. Someone please prove me wrong. I've slaved hours trying to figure out why i have 450megs of used storage space when i don't have anything installed. But i've come to realize that that's just the way Android is. They never expected you to keep the phone long enough to actually fill it with stuff. You're suppose to throw the phone in a landfill every 6-12 months and buy a new replacement. This is how the phones are built. If they expected you to keep your phone for more than a year, maybe they would've included some sort of file management system and intelligent backup and sync for your all of your data. But there's no such thing on Android. You just have to sit there and slave away for hours trying to figure out what's taking all that damn space off your phone.

**jmuru** · 12-26-2011, 05:21 AM

Originally Posted by bfguns

where is the actual directory of where your text messages are stored?

/data/data/com.android.providers/telephony/databases/mmssms.db

Originally Posted by boyziggy

It's impossible to clear space from your android phone. You can wipe it clean. That's about it. Someone please prove me wrong. I've slaved hours trying to figure out why i have 450megs of used storage space when i don't have anything installed. But i've come to realize that that's just the way Android is. They never expected you to keep the phone long enough to actually fill it with stuff. You're suppose to throw the phone in a landfill every 6-12 months and buy a new replacement. This is how the phones are built. If they expected you to keep your phone for more than a year, maybe they would've included some sort of file management system and intelligent backup and sync for your all of your data. But there's no such thing on Android. You just have to sit there and slave away for hours trying to figure out what's taking all that damn space off your phone.

There's a lot of great apps that backup your data like MyBackup root or Titanium backup. And, if you root and flash an MTD ROM, you can change how much partition space you have to get rid of those low space messages. Most likely you have something large taking up all your space like MMS or a backup (average CWM backup is about 500MB, though that's stored on the SD card, at least).

**jim2112** · 12-26-2011, 06:28 AM

I used a different text messenger app and turned off the notifications on the stock app. This stopped the notifications but still stored all the messages, pics included. I went in the old app and deleted all those. Also all cach and history in your internet browser.

Sent from my Rezound using Tapatalk

**uscpsycho** · 12-27-2011, 06:20 AM

Originally Posted by Galane

Have you also deleted your text message and e-mail logs? Got a bunch of picture mails? What about photos in internal memory? Ringtones and music? Put them all on the card.

Just have to remember that when mounted as USB Mass Storage, nothing on the card is accessible to the phone, so any contact you have a custom ringtone for on the card will use the default ring as long as the phone is being used as storage for your computer.

What do you mean delete email logs? How?

**5dadd7** · 01-03-2012, 01:21 PM

I had the same problem on my Epic with Gingerbread. Here is the answer I found off the Sprint Forum on the Sprint website. It seems that some apps that can now be moved to the SD card are in the internal storage and that the only way to fix it is to delete the programs that was installed before EC05 and reinstall again. I went ahead and wiped everything out (formatted internal storage) which was a pain in the ****. It did fix my problem with the internal storage being low notificaitons.

**supernal** · 01-28-2013, 11:20 AM

I've been looking into this myself.
Turns out.. this is what's going on.

There is of course memory directly on the phone that has nothing to do with any SDcards that may be installed.

this memory is partitioned into 2 partitions.
/system
and
/data

(i'm doing this from memory, as i'm basically looking to help my gf out of this same issue, so my details may be a bit fuzzy, but over all correct)

So /system has something like 250 MB of room, which houses the OS itself for the phone.
/data partition has 500 MB of room, and sadly, this is where all the data get stored when you install apk's (apps) onto the phone.
Even if you move the apk itself to the sdcard, the majority of the data the software uses gets stored in this tiny 500 MB of space, and can't BE moved anywhere else. This is the design of android.

I don't have an answer yet.. but i know i'm on the right track..
what needs to happen is some sort of mounting of the /data partition to a folder on the SD card.

This would allow that 500 MB of storage to open up to however big the SD card is... I found a bit of software in the Play store that is part of the answer for getting this done.
I have a feeling this is best done with someone who not only have root access to their phone, but knows a bit about linux in general in case something goes wrong.

Meaning if you do this, and someone removes the sdcard.. might be a bit catastrophic for the phone.
I'm not sure what the effects would be.. still researching this.

the app store has an app called
Mounts2SD - ALl in one SD-ext that looks promising.
I haven;t gotten a chance to play with any of this yet though....

Good luck guys.

**Chantel Ironchild** · 01-28-2013, 08:56 PM

How Can I fix this problem with the Internal Phone storage is getting low?? Really need some help. it says ive used 163MB and only have 18MB how do i fix it?