My Note 5 has storage issues

[AC Question]

I have a very specific problem with my phone sadly, and this is a very recent problem. I have a Samsung Note 5 running Android Version 7.0, this is a great phone that I have had for about 1.5 years but recently been running into some storage issues. The storage capacity for this phone is a nice 32 GB. Normally I have two-thirds of the phone storage used for my pictures, videos, music, and alike. I save around 6-8 GB free for when I download games using my phone to put them on my computer (my WiFi is terrible but my phone data is better). And everything has been great recently except just last night when I realized I had only 3.3 GB free for some reason. I looked through my phone and deleted every file I didn't need and it did not free up much space. So I deleted the apps I use to download games and that did nothing, thinking one of them might be the problem. Then I literally went through every file of my phone and saw no hidden large files. Then I hooked my phone up to my computer and noticed something... my computer tells me that my phone no longer has 32 GB of storage, it only has 24.1 GB of storage somehow. And just yesterday everything was fine and my computer correctly recognized that my phone has 32 GB but now it only recognized 24.1 GB of it. So I looked into the system of my phone and found out that my system memory is now a whopping 7.8 GB for some reason. That would explain the huge cut in my available storage space on my phone. If anyone could help me out with this it would mean so much to me! Thank you for reading this, maybe you have insight that I don't. : )

 

[JackTheDev]

Usually, advertisers mention the total storage, without saying how much is taken up by the OS and by bloatware.

My phone, for example. comes with 8GB of storage but the OS takes up most of it.

I'd suggest clearing caches for apps, and installing an app like All In One toolbox, which scans for useless files and deletes them

 

[Rukbat]

Clear cache for the system (you'll have to restart in recovery to do that). Part of that additional system storage may just be cache files that the system failed to clean up.

NEVER run an app that says "Clean up ROM, RAM memory, SD card, running process" - ROM is "Read Only Memory", it can't be "cleaned up. Android doesn't want RAM cleaned up, it wants as much used as possible (see Multitasking the Android Way (technical) if you want to learn why) - Android isn't Windows. And you definitely don't want to "clean up" a running process in any computer - that just causes the process to crash.

It also says, "Clean up duplicate files and photos". Only you know whether a picture or other file is a duplicate, so no app can automatically delete duplicates. And "Clean up other garbage like obsolete files, residual files, empty folders, app leftover" is nonsense - how does the app know if a file you haven't used in 10 months is obsolete? Maybe you only use it on Christmas, nut want it in the phone. "Residual files"? Except for cache, there's no such thing. There may be empty folders that you want kept. And "app leftover" is another "words that mean nothing".

If I hadn't checked the developer name, I'd think it was Cheetah - they don't understand how Android works either.

Clean up the caches (one for each app, one for storage and one in recovery), and uninstall apps and delete files by yourself. You don't need an app deleting things you want then, when you come here and find out that you can't restore them ... well, you figure that one out.

But at least back up the entire phone before playing around in it. See Backing up an Android Device.