Where did my storage go?

[Android Central Question]

Hey everyone,

I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 and I've been suffering with storage for a while now.

I bought a 32GB SD card and mounted it to the phone and I'm storing videos and songs in it.

But sometimes when I copy a movie or a big media file from the PC (Windows 7) to the phone via USB cable the copying process gets interrupted for some reason and the copying fails.

Now I'll give an example of my problem.

Let's say I had exactly 2GB free space on my SD card and I tried to copy a 1GB videos to the SD card and the progress reach 70% and gets terminated for some reason, now I have a file that's 700MB laying somewhere in the SD card and taking up space. I can't find it with the PC or the phone's File Manager and would like your help with that.

Is there an app that shows the files that were failed copying attempts and removes them?

Or can am I just missing something here.

I think there's almost 12GB worth of storage occupied by the failed copying attempts. And the same goes for the internal memory when I copy files to it and fail.

Hopefully I made sense and really I'm sorry for my bad essay-writing skills.

Thank you in advance.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! The SD card could be corrupt, defective, or counterfeit. Install SD Insight to see if the card is genuine or counterfeit. Counterfeit cards are programmed to report more storage than they actually have, and if you try saving more than the card can actually hold, then files can start getting corrupt. (Be aware that SD Insight might not work on all Nougat devices.)


If it's a valid card, then go to Settings>Storage, Unmount the card, remove it, and insert it into your computer. Can the computer read these files? Backup as much as you can right now, then run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html

To see if you can find those file fragments, look for a directory called LOST.DIR. If it's present, delete it, and see if that recovers some space for you.

 

[ShehabKhaled]

Thank you very much for replying.


This issue isn't just with the SD card, it happens when I copy into the internal memory too.

If like, about 500MB is copied from a 750MB file and the copying fails I'm left with a 500MB worth of data somewhere in it.


Deleting the LOST.DIR file did nothing.



It's like if a file didn't finish copying I'm left with what got copied before the copying processes got terminated.

 

[B. Diddy]

What if you go to Settings>Storage, tap Cached Data, and clear all app caches? If that doesn't help, try also wiping the cache partition: https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-28492