17 MB Free Storage Suddenly Disappeared - Help Needed

[clabbertoon]

Over the past few days, the free internal storage on my phone has suddenly dropped dramatically, and now there is almost no room left--I need to keep deleting apps. I can't understand where all the space is going. I haven't been installing new apps, and I've been deleting caches for everything.

I started with just under 20MB free on the internal storage, which stayed pretty constant for many weeks. I'm unrooted, stock firmware, the ZVC version (never accepted the pushed update). A few days ago I was very surprised to see the free storage down to maybe 8MB. I figured maybe it had to do with temporary files from market updates, but the number has been going down rapidly ever since then. Yesterday I went under the 1MB mark; I can no longer receive text messages or emails.

I've looked at the memory usage reported under Settings-->Applications and nothing has suddenly jumped up in size. I have tried clearing the caches for everything, including the browser, the market, YouTube, Google Maps, etc., and gained no appreciable free space. I've started to uninstall apps, but this has not freed up any unexpectedly large amounts of memory.

The apps I've used in the relevant period have been TweetDeck, GTasks, Email (stock), Browser (stock), Maps, Google Sky Map, and Locus Free. I have since deleted Locus Free, on the theory that this might be the culprit, but it hasn't helped.

Any thoughts on what might be eating up my storage and how I might fix it? Failing that, if I need to delete everything and start over from scratch, is there a way I can do so and keep the ZVC firmware? Thanks in advance for any replies!

 

[Jessicalt1]

Can you move anything to SD card that isn't already moved?

 

[DoesItMatter]

Go into Google Maps

Menu Button -> More -> Cache Settings -> Clear map tile cache

Mine was sitting at around 8MB - see what size yours is taking up.

Not sure about Google Sky maps - but that may have a cache data store as well.

Also check e-mails for attachments, SMS/MMS messages.

Hopefully you don't sync to Facebook or some other online friends waste of time.

Those are notorious for dumping too much data to a phone and crashing it.

 

[clabbertoon]

Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I've moved everything to SD that can be moved, and I had cleared out the Google Maps tile cache.

The situation ended up resolving itself. I put the phone in Airplane Mode overnight, and when I checked it the next day, suddenly I had 19MB free again. My hypothesis is that there was some weird memory bug having to do with receiving text messages and/or voice mail while roaming (towards the end, I kept getting notifications of a text message along with "unable to receive text message--memory full."

Hope it doesn't recur, but at least for the moment my phone is usable again . . . phew!

 

[clabbertoon]

. . . aand now my free space has gone up to 44.4mb--without removing anything. Clearly something was clogging the pipes, but it's a total mystery to me what that might have been. My other android device goes through odd swings in available memory too, but nothing this extreme.

 

[kh777]

I'm in the same boat and would love to reclaim more storage. I have app2sd and have moved everything that can be moved to the SD card. Every once in a while I clear the cache, and also clear the partition but that doesn't help much. I've found the phone just doesn't work right when storage space runs low.