Storage problem on Galaxy S4 Mini

[furimari]

Sooo hi there. ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ
I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with Android 4.4.2 on it. It has 8 GB of memory with a 16 GB sd card.
My problem is that for some app (i haven't checked all of them, but I saw this for at least two big games that I had), my phone tells me that most of the data is stored on the sd card (like so https://i.imgur.com/pmfYhlX.png ). However, when I checked the total used space on my phone, I realized that it didn't add up, so I checked with an app and realized that my phone was in fact storing the data directly on the phone storage, not the sd card ( https://i.imgur.com/SoGNRta.png ). I also checked the folder it had created for the game on the sd card, and it was empty.

Since my phone storage is fairly small, it bothers me quite a bit that it doesn't store data on the sd card like it says it does. Does anyone have a solution for this ? :c

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I moved this from the KitKat forum to the S4 mini forum, for more specific traffic.

When you go to Settings>Apps​ and select the app, is there a Move to SD button?

 

[furimari]

Thanks !! And yeah sorry, I wasn't totally sure about which category I should put my question in.

And yes, there was a move to sd button, and I already clicked on it (which is why now there is the Move to device storage button, like showed in my screen), and the app details say that the data has been moved to the sd card, but it hasn't, which is my problem.
(Just in case, I moved everything back to the device storage then clicked again on Move to SD, but yeah didn't change anything)

 

[B. Diddy]

What app were you using to look at the storage locations? Try DiskUsage.

 

[furimari]

Yeah, that's the one I used !
And now that I take a closer look at what's stored on my sd card, I wonder if even ANY of my apps are storing data on it...
Here's a list of what's supposed to be stored on my sd card : https://i.imgur.com/M0yWbAj.png
And here's what DiskUsage shows me (for the sd card) : https://i.imgur.com/ZRSYzEl.png

 

[B. Diddy]

The data from the apps might be listed as "System Data" in DiskUsage. And although the 1.21 GB of System Data on the SD card doesn't exactly correlate with the "2.4 GB Used" shown in the Settings>Storage menu, the total SD card usage is still comparable (2.4 GB according to the phone's Settings>Storage menu, and 2.3 GB according to DiskUsage). I think the Settings>Storage menu isn't implying that your app data on the SD card adds up to 2.4 GB. That bottom bar is showing you how much total data is on the SD card. If you add up all of the data shown there, it's about 1.3-1.4 GB. If you then add the additional 945 MB of music that DiskUsage shows, that ends up being about 2.3-2.4 GB.

 

[furimari]

Mmmh
If the System Data on the sd card IS the data from the different apps, then what's stored on the phone's storage doesn't make sense though
Because this is what DiskUsage shows me for the phone's storage : https://i.imgur.com/6JR2fKw.png
The data for the game I talked about (that I put in red) shouldn't be this big if most of it is stored on the sd card ? Because if there IS 1.07 GB of this game's data on the sd card, then there should only be 27.89MB on the phone, like it thinks ??

 

[B. Diddy]

It depends on how big that Mystic Messenger game is. If you move everything back to Phone Storage, how big is it?

 

[furimari]

Well
When it's stored on the sd card, there's 27.04 MB of the app on the phone, 120 MB on the sd card and 0.95 GB of additional data on the sd card. It says the total is 1.10 GB.
When I click on Move to phone storage, it moves only the 120 MB back on the phone (I don't know if it's normal ?), and then the new total is 1.08 GB for some reason ??
And I realized that what I showed in red earlier is probably the additional data for the game (which should be on the sd card :'( ), because the number didn't change when I moved the app, what changed was this part :
When stored on the sd card : https://i.imgur.com/SrovRPs.png
When I move it back to phone storage : https://i.imgur.com/6Txut3b.png
So apparently I can move the app just fine, but there's still almost 1 GB of additional data that's supposedly on the sd card but isn't ?? I mean, maybe I can't move it to begin with, but then I'd like to at least know why my phone says it's stored on the sd card.

 

[B. Diddy]

I agree, this is confusing. I've never used DiskUsage myself, so I'm having a little trouble understanding the layout of those screens. I'm guessing that "Storage Card" refers to the phone's Internal Storage, and not the external SD card.

If you use My Files or any other file manager app, look in the /Android/data directory on Internal Storage. Do you see that com.Cheritz.MysticMessenger directory there?

 

[furimari]

Ah yeah yeah, the storage card refers to the phone, for the sd card it writes "/storage/extSdCard"
And yeah, if I look into the phone storage with file manager, the folder is still there :
https://i.imgur.com/lfCd2uq.png
https://i.imgur.com/MrHpBrc.png
(To be honest at this point I'm considering moving the folder myself to the sd card with my computer but I'm pretty sure the app will just be lost and stop functioning)

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, the folder is there on Internal Storage, but is there anything in that folder? It says it only has one item in it, so that doesn't seem like it would be the 0.9 GB that was mentioned above (unless it's just one big .obb file).

 

[furimari]

No no, it says one element because directly inside, there's only one folder, but if you check my second screen you see the total number of folders, files et the total size !

 

[B. Diddy]

Oh, sorry. This is a headscratcher.:-\ It could be a problem with how the game was coded. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to fix this. One possibility would be to root the phone and use an app like Link2SD or App Mgr III, but I don't have the rooting experience to give you detailed instructions.

 

[furimari]

Oh well, it's ok, I knew that the problem was kind of weird, so I kind of expected there would be no answer. I wanted to avoid rooting since sometimes games stop working if they detect root. :'(
I think I'll give up on this then, I might just get a new phone since this one is pretty old.
Thank you for giving me some of your time, and sorry if it kind of looks like I wasted your time. :')

 

[B. Diddy]

No problem at all. This kind of discussion can be valuable, even if we don't come to a solution. Others might see this discussion at a later date and come up with more ideas.