My phone is saying I have free memory space but my computer disagrees

[Randomguy2324]

I will preface this with the fact that I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact I've been demoted to the counter. It's a sad life.

I will also say the phone I own is an LG X2 power for the sake of diagnosis.

but anyway my post modern dad joke aside I've been trying to add a small nearly six mb mp3 file to my alarms folder on my phone.

when I try to though it says don't have enough storage in fact it says I have literally zero bytes available in my internal storage but I'll look at my storage on my phone only to see five hundread megabytes give or take some fluctuating cached data.

Even stranger is I've added a ringtone before to the same phone a few months back with essentially the same storage situation and it worked just fine. The kicker is (while not by too much) it was a larger file!

So please someone smarter than me help me out here. Please make I more smarter. Rock,flag and eagle.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! How are you trying to add the mp3 file to the /Alarms directory? Are you downloading it from a website, or are you copying it over from your computer?

When the phone's Internal Storage starts getting down to several hundred MB free, it can become more difficult to save things, because the system has a storage threshold where it won't allow anything to be saved (in order to make sure there's enough space left for cached data and other important system processes). 500 MB seems a bit high, though -- it's usually more like 200-300 MB. See what happens if you uninstall one or two unimportant apps, then see if you can save the file.

 

[Rukbat]

Looking at the storage on the phone (Settings/Storage) doesn't tell you how much free space you have - because it doesn't tell you how much space you have to begin with. True, the phone has 8GB of eMMC memory used as internal storage, but it's partitioned (like a hard drive), so you don't know how large the userdata partition is. (If you install a terminal app and run df [or, probably, run df from adb on a computer with the phone connected - although I've never tried it that way], you'll get the size of the userdata (or sdcard] partition. The first number is the total size of the partition, the next number is the amount of the partition used and the third number is the amount of space free.)

But on an 8GB phone, these days, you'll run out of space quickly. Even 32GB is a bit small these days. (And the phone is 7 years old. Some people just like to change their phones every year, but another reason for updating a phone is that Android keeps getting larger, apps keep getting larger, but a 7 year old phone doesn't get larger.)