"Phone and Messaging Storage" app at nearly 12 GB of internal storage!

[Foleipho]

So I posted about this in the past but the one response I received was not helpful, and since then (only a couple of months ago), another 3 GB of storage has been eaten by this mysterious app. I cannot believe that the storing of the few texts I send could add up to 3 GB in just a couple of months, if that's even what this app does or what takes up the memory it eats. Can someone tell me what this app is and does??? It comes stock with the device (blackberry PRIV, marshmallow, 6.0.1) and cannot be disabled. The person who responded the last time just said it could be because of something I downloaded that made it begin to malfunction, but I have no way of knowing which app that is and am avoiding a factory reset, plus still have no idea about the nature of the app itself. I did contact T-Mobile at his additional suggestion to ask them to reflash the software, and they said it would be irrelevant and couldn't do that anyway. My internal storage is busting at the seams, phone consequently isn't functioning properly, and I'm so bewildered by this app.

 

[kmf1]

Re: "Phone and Messaging Storage" app at nearly 12 GB of internal storage!

So I posted about this in the past but the one response I received was not helpful, and since then (only a couple of months ago), another 3 GB of storage has been eaten by this mysterious app. I cannot believe that the storing of the few texts I send could add up to 3 GB in just a couple of months, if that's even what this app does or what takes up the memory it eats. Can someone tell me what this app is and does??? It comes stock with the device (blackberry PRIV, marshmallow, 6.0.1) and cannot be disabled. The person who responded the last time just said it could be because of something I downloaded that made it begin to malfunction, but I have no way of knowing which app that is and am avoiding a factory reset, plus still have no idea about the nature of the app itself. I did contact T-Mobile at his additional suggestion to ask them to reflash the software, and they said it would be irrelevant and couldn't do that anyway. My internal storage is busting at the seams, phone consequently isn't functioning properly, and I'm so bewildered by this app.

Have you checked on this at crackberry.com? I haven't had BB phones for years, but it was my go-to site when I did.
m.crackberry.com

 

[Lorkanov]

This was my reply to your last post:
(...sorry admin, but this wasn't intended as a spam)

I am having the very same problem.
What I noticed is that removing my Google account from the phone and restarting it reduces the Phone and Messaging Storage size to 2 mb only.
I also noticed that this case however is unique to Android Marshmallow only. It doesn't matter whether your phone has 1gb or 64gb internal phone storage memory. The phone and Messaging Storage app will fill it up from 1 day to 2 weeks at the most.

The only way I know on how to avoid this is not having 500 or more entries on your phone book. It doesn't matter whether the entries are inside or outside of your of your Google account.

Edit:
It seems like Marshmallow is keeping additional duplicates of all data stored in your SMS and Contacts plus call history and every available bit of data regarding your contacts in a database called "Phone and Messaging Storage" for easy access to each contact details related to it.
So the more contacts you have, the faster this app will grow in sizes. It will only stop growing when there's no more free space left on your phone or it has collected and compiled all data available for all your contacts.
Meaning, the less individual separate contact entries you have, the smaller Phone and Messaging Storage app size you will have.

(E.g. try creating a single contact entry with name, number, email, address, etc. ...and watch the size grow.) It doesn't matter whether it's the same contact duplicated over and over or different entries, the size will still grow.

...and NO, I don't know how to resolve this problem. All I know is a work around to avoid it.
But I still want my 3k contacts in my phone. And this infernal Phone and Messaging Storage app issue is preventing me from having that.

 

[Foleipho]

THANK YOU SO MUCH for your response, Lorkanov, and my apologies for taking so long to reply. It's both comforting to know I'm not the only one, and frustrating to discover there's no solution. Why does it seem no one else (or not very many others, at least) are having this issue? At this point, according to what you've written, it seems like there's nothing I can do and eventually my phone will be useless? I'm not trying to wipe my device of my accounts and start from scratch every week. Have you tried a factory reset? If the guy that responded to my initial post before this one (when I was at 8 GB of eaten storage) is right and this is an app malfunction as a result of something that was installed or other change made on the phone, then hypothetically, a factory reset would wipe whatever apps I installed and undo all changes and I'd be starting from scratch. Of course, the second time around, I'd make sure not to download anything but the bare essential apps in hopes none of them caused the issue, but I wouldn't bother with any of this at all if it would have no effect. What do you think?

 

[Foleipho]

Oh, and have you tried to "clear data" for this app? I'm afraid to do it, thinking it would delete all my text messages and phone records, which I'd like to keep, but it seems the only other way to clear that storage space, unfortunately.

 

[Grabber5.0]

Re: "Phone and Messaging Storage" app at nearly 12 GB of internal storage!

You could use SMS Backup and Restore or a similar app to back them up first, then restore them afterward. Do you have any idea how many messages you have? It can back up sms, mms, and call history. I use it to sync when I swap phones.