What's eating up space on my LG phone?

[synmag]

I have an old LG V20 (64GB) with the following usage reports used/free GBs:

After connecting to my laptop windows explorer and checking each directory:
31.9/32.1

Windows explorer properties on V20 internal drive:
50.1/0.9

Phone file manager:
54.3/1.5

I suspect the culprit is hidden backup files.

History: A long time ago I setup both LG and google backups. I have a ~1GB backup file on my google drive under the LG backup directory.

I recall setting up auto backup for over night but my phone rarely was connected. Whenever I did connect it and received a successful backup message I noticed my available storage went down significantly. I'd go in and clean up only to be in the same situation after the next backup. Now I can't cleanup anything else.

I'm on Android 8 and there are three options under Backup in the setting menu: I tried the LG restore/switch apps but can't find any option to browse for a backup file internally. 1. LG switch the options are USB cable, wireless, and SD card. 2. Backup & Restore goes to google drive. 3. Google backup is a configuration menu.

There is about 20GB in hidden/unreported files. How do I find this either on the phone or from windows? It's possible that it's not backup related but I'd be surprised however I'm open to anything at this point.

At this point I'm thinking of doing a factory reset but that's a bit extreme.

Any help would be appreciated. I realize this is an old phone but I imagine if it is a hidden backup file issue it would be similar on current phones.

I do have a newer phone but I still like the v20 more and use it regularly so please keep upgrade your phone solutions to yourself

 

[Laura Knotek]

Do you have a lot of photos from Telegram, WhatsApp, or another messaging app?

Do you have an SD card for storage of media?

 

[Kizzy Catwoman]

Yes both the apps Laura mentioned automatically download videos and images to their folders and this can take up a LOT of space. I clean mine regularly for this reason.

 

[synmag]

I do have WhatsApp but I only use it a few times a year. I mostly use Twitter and Facebook and if they preload pictures/videos that could be at play but wouldn't these be included in the memory usage? Something unreported is taking up space this is why I'm thinking it would be a system function like a backup and I can see why they would be hidden in order to not have them deleted.

I do have a fair amount of photos but that is accounted for.

I just thought of something that can happen on hard drives. I assume android would report any bad memory like bad sectors on a HD. Is defragging a thing with flash memory?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Try DiskUsage to see what's taking up space.

 

[synmag]

Thanks, though I joined a long time ago I just don't post much as I have been able to find most things!

Thanks for the tip on the app I haven't seen this one before. Ok, it's reporting 17.8GB for system which seems very high. My two year old Samsung that has 128GB internal space is reporting 50GB for the system. I gotta look into that separately. I mean the phone was available in a 64GB version and surely the OS can't take up most of the space!

The LG has an Android directory (4.77GB) listed under media which I assumed to be the OS footprint. It has two directories called data 3.83GB and obb 953MB with further subdirs etc. etc. Perhaps this is the problem?

If the system data is the folder with the OS why is it so large? 18GB for the OS is almost half the internal space which at the time was huge as a lot of phones only had 32 or even 16.

Both phones received an OS update along with a bunch of security updates. Perhaps the downloaded packages can be cleaned up if they are part of that system folder? I will start googling this but any help is appreciated.

 

[B. Diddy]

17.8 GB for the system on a 64 GB phone is not unusual, because in addition to Android system apps/files, that also includes preinstalled bloatware (that was preinstalled by LG and/or the carrier). Also, for technical reasons that I'm not entirely sure of, the actual space taken up by the system will inflate as the device's internal storage goes up. So a 128 GB phone will report more space taken up by the system than a 64 GB phone, even if they have the same system apps and bloatware.

The Android directory under media could be photos and videos related to messaging apps or social media apps. Check all of those kinds of apps in your system settings to see if they use large amounts of app data/cache.

OBB files are large bundles of assets for apps you installed, so don't mess with them unless you intend to uninstall those particular apps.

 

[synmag]

I can accept that Android/bloatware has grown this big. The thing is that the V20 hasn't received updates for years and the available space seems to be declining. I keep removing stuff, use the phone for a few months then I get the notice that I'm running low on space again. Apply/lather/rinse/repeat.

Just for kicks I started up my really old G3 which is a 32GB 25GB available to the phone running Android 6. The system folder is 1.1GB and the Android folder is 2.5GB. 3.6GB of 32GB.

Bloatware wasn't too bad on the v20 but on the Samsung I can't even remove stuff, it only lets me disable apps.

I guess I'm SOL and will need to remove apps and media that I don't use as frequently.

 

[B. Diddy]

Can you clarify for your V20 -- does it definitely have 64 GB internal storage, or is it 32 GB with a 32 GB SD card inserted?

 

[synmag]

Sure, it's 64GB internal with no SD inserted at the moment.

 

[B. Diddy]

Using a file manager app, look for the /DCIM/Camera/.thumbnails directory. (If there's an option in the file manager to Show Hidden Files/Folders, make sure that's turned on.) How big is that folder?

 

[synmag]

That is a good lead and I suspected that photos might have something to do with this even though I do clean them up from time to time but unfortunately that directory is inconsequential. The entire DICM directory is only 300MB and the thumbnail directory, while it hasn't been cleaned, only contains about 30MB with 5-20KB each.

I do have google photos upload turned on and at one point it repopulated the phone after I delted photos I didn't want. That got fixed. I also had residual files from the trash not getting emptied, or not right away anyway. It's annoying when you are deleting stuff yet the available space doesn't increase!

I will remove the thumbnails to see what happens as even though they don't take up a lot of space they may be holding on to more than I think. Again, I'm not intimately familiar with the Android file system but I do know windows and how a lot of small files can eat up more space than you think due to the smallest addresable blocks being larger than the file. This does become an issue when the HD gets large but somehow I don't think it should be an issue at 64GB.

Ideally I want to have at least 1GB free but more like 2-3 to let the OS breath and work efficiently.

 

[B. Diddy]

Can you confirm -- did you already look through the various messaging and social media apps in your Settings>Apps​ menu, to see how big each of their caches and data storage numbers are?

 

[synmag]

The native messaging app takes up 16MB which I assume includes all the sms history I haven't deleted.
Chrome is the one big one but even that is reported at 643MB showing 372MB internal memory the rest is data usage. I typically use Chrome for the very reason of avoiding giving permissions to apps and have them hog memory.
Instagram shows at 218MB which I rarely use and it's been there for a long time.
Facebook is bloatware and it is disabled.

I wonder if it's possible that everything is slowly growing and it's death by a thousand cuts. For example, one app I do use is duolingo along with Mosalingua and Duo is 558MB which while not crazy if it has grown by 200MB things can add up. Mosalingue is about 50MB per language and Disk Usage shows 150MB in total.


I suspect the various Google apps contribute to storage creep with play services being by far the largest component at 1.4GB:
Google Play Services 1.4GB
gmail 259MB
Google maps 434MB

Again I don't know by how much these have grown but google play looks very suspicious.

I'm happy to provide more info as this may be helpful to others since I'm sure this applies to current Android versions and newer phones. Perhaps others can provide data points as well to compare. I'd be curious how google play has grown for others etc.

So unless social media stores things elsewhere not accounted for they shouldn't be an issue. I can probably reduce the chrome footprint if it has cashed data but again it doesn't look like a lot unless it has grown by a few hundred MB.

Now that I have recorded this here I can come back to reference it later when I run out of space again. Once I remove photos I should be up to 3GB available from a point where I couldn't install an app.

 

[B. Diddy]

Also go to Settings>Apps, then tap Menu>Show System, and look for something like Messaging Storage. How big is that?

 

[synmag]

It shows 15.74MB same as the size for the app.
I need to look into why Google Play services is using 1.4GB. I gotta believe a large chunk of that should be available to remove.

 

[B. Diddy]

The tricky thing about Google Play Services is that a lot of apps utilize it, so the data that's saved could be related to various different apps. You can try clearing the cache/data from Google Play Services, but it might be unpredictable how this affects some of your apps.