Installed CM10 Nightly, but lost most of my 16 gig's on my S3

[jpent]

I have the Galaxy S3 (Verizon) and I decided to try the CyanogenMod 12/9 Nightly. Backed up, so I have lost nothing. The problems is that I am left with just 1.54GB left of the hard drive. Oddly the remaining items on my "total space" screen shows the following: Apps 896mb; Pictures, Video 348mb; Audio 3.42Gig; Downloads 15.18; available 1.54. The bar is greyed out about 60%. Obviously this means that I can do very little with the phone.

I am sure there is an obvious reason why. I like CM10, however, I would like to open up the missing memory. Even if I need to wipe it all clean and start over.

Any advice appreciated. This is a fantastic forum.

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

It's your CWM backups. Look in /data/media/ and you'll find huge blob files from ClockWorkMod

 

[jpent]

You were right. I re-did it overnight, leaving those out and it is great now. I thought I could just go in and delete it and the space would be reallocated. For some reason it was not.

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

You were right. I re-did it overnight, leaving those out and it is great now. I thought I could just go in and delete it and the space would be reallocated. For some reason it was not.

It actually should... If you delete the ClockworkMod backups and blobs folders, you should get that data back immediately (although I suppose there could be some lag between when you delete them and when it shows up as available space in the phone settings. Just know, that the deleting the blobs folder renders you unable to restore any CWM backups.

There are 2 types of backup you can do when in CWM: "dup" (newer, default) and "tar" (older). You can choose which type to use by selecting "choose backup format" from the backup menu in CWM prior to doing your backup. Here is the difference between the two:

dup (default): creates a "Blobs" folder (which can be very large) and an individual backup file (which is much smaller) the first time you run it. The "Blobs" contains the pieces that are common across all backups, so each subsequent backup only needs to create a smaller backup file with the unique files for that instance. In other words, it's essentially as if you're just doing an incremental backup each time. You start with one very large full backup, then each backup after that is much smaller. *IF* you tend to keep a lot of frequent backups, this method probably works best to save on space in the long run. The disadvantage is that because the Blobs file is so large and must be retained for ANY of the backups to be restore-able, there's no way to delete older backups if you need to free up space -- you're pretty much force to just delete everything.

tar: Each backup you take creates it's own completely independent file -- i.e. each backup is a full backup. Previously, this was the only method available to use. If you have more than 2 or 3 backups, it will take up more space, however you can safely delete individual backups to reclaim storage space if you need it. I prefer this method as I feel it makes backups easier to manage and I rarely keep more than 1 or 2 backups on my device.