Miscellaneous files in storage

[radiospace]

I've got a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+.

I'm having trouble with storage of files because "Miscellaneous Files" are using up most of my 64 GB of storage.

Here is how my Storage looks according to the phone:

Total Space 64 GB

Available Space 506 MB

Apps 7.33 GB

Pictures, video 11.16 GB

Audio 1.47 GB

cached Data 2.41 MB

Miscellaneous Files 43.30 GB

That's a little over 2/3 of my 64 GB being taken up by so-called Miscellaneous Files.

Now, if I click on Miscellaneous Files, it breaks it down somewhat:

System Memory 10.78 GB
.face 81.11 MB
update-release-20.0000.apk 5.16 MB

It continues with smaller and smaller file sizes to list about 20 more files. The total size of all those small files is at most 10 MB (most are 4 kilobytes or so).

So the total Miscellaneous files it details is less than 11 GB, but it is using 43 GB of space, so there are about 32 GB of mysterious files on the phone taking up space that aren't accounted for.

Any help?

 

[Golfdriver97]

Something is being misreported to the OS. The real question is what. It may be possible there are hidden files. Perhaps connecting to a PC will show them. I think you can view hidden files under the files tab in the window once connected.

 

[radiospace]

I have a Mac and must connect using the Android File Transfer App... I don't see any tabs in the window of this app so I guess you are referring to a Windows interface?

 

[radiospace]

I'm just manually going through the folders in Android File Transfer.... it's a highly irritating process, because unlike in the Mac OS, I can't right click on a folder and see its size (including the contents of all its subfolders), so I have to burrow down into every subfolder opening it up and look at the size of the individual files.

If I could "select all" folders I'd probably just copy the entire contents to my Mac hard drive and go through it that way, but there's no "select all" or selecting multiple folders whatsoever in Android File Transfer, as far as I can tell...

Anyway, the main point of this update:

I discovered the DCIM folder (which contains photographs and videos, amongst other things) is 41 GB total size in all its subfolders. (I determined this by dragging it to my desktop, at which point OSX informs me the size of the folder that I am copying).

Since Android OS is reporting the total file size of Pictures and Videos on my S6 as 11 GB, it seems likely that this is the source of the misreporting -- I mean the sizes are pretty close -- 32 GB not accounted for my the Android OS, and DCIM is 30 GB larger than the phone thinks the photos and videos on my phone are.

There may be other things in DCIM that account for it being so large, but there's really nowhere in the Android STORAGE report that could account for all those GB, except the missing "Miscellaneous files".

I shoot some RAW photography with my Edge+ (one of the reasons I chose it), and if it's set up the way I think, it saves both a jpeg and a raw of the same image when shooting RAW... So, my first instinct it maybe it is only counting the JPEGs vs. the "Pictures, videos" storage report, and the RAW is the stuff that is unaccounted for? (A wild guess). Once the folder finishes copying to the Mac I will poke around in it and see what's there.

 

[radiospace]

Another update:

After copying the DCIM folder to my Mac, I was able to determine that there are 32 GB of RAW photographs (and 11 GB of jpegs and mpeg movies).

This matches almost exactly the missing storage space according to the Android OS (it reports 11 GB of "Pictures, videos" and there are about 32 GB of "Miscellaneous files" that are unaccounted for).

I'm going to consider the mystery solved -- RAW photograph files get reported as "Miscellaneous files", but don't show up itemized under that tab.

 

[radiospace]

Just another update for any future person who my run across this thread with the same problem:

I highly suspect at this point that the root of the problem is that the phone is not deleting the RAW copies of photographs when I delete the photo in the Photo app. In other words, the phone probably still has every RAW photo on it I have ever taken, even though the majority of them have been deleted. I just did a test and deleted 51 old photos and the size of the files under "Photos, videos...." went down as one would expect, but the size of "Miscellaneous files" did not change at all. (It should have reduced the size of the misc. files by over 1 GB, according to my back-of-the-napkin math).

 

[Golfdriver97]

Sorry about the delay. Have you considered a factory reset?

 

[radiospace]

Hi Golf,

Thanks for your help.

I think I actually figured it out -- that the missing space are the RAW photographic files that are not being deleted along with the jpegs. Once I am sure that I have backed up all the RAW files to my computer, I will just manually delete them using Android File Transfer (I'm assuming that's possible... if not... factory reset).

One thing to note, I had not actually looked at any of my RAW files from this camera until yesterday when studying this problem. They look TERRIBLE. They look even worse than the images from my first digital camera, a 1.4 megapixel Fuji. I use Adobe Lightroom so it will be interesting to take them into Lightroom and see how they clean up, but my quick impression is that it isn't worth shooting RAW on this phone. The main problem is vast amounts of color noise in the shadows. The camera's jpeg engine does a fine job of cleaning them up so if you don't open the RAW files on a computer you'd never know.

Anyway between the low quality of the RAW images and the problem with them not deleting I might just give up the idea that the S6 Edge+ is a semi-serious camera....

 

[Golfdriver97]

Thanks for the follow up. Sorry I wasn't that much help. Glad you got it figured out though.