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I don’t know about you, but one of the most infuriating things I have to deal with when it comes to my phone is constantly getting the “you need free up some of your storage” notification.
While I love almost everything about my budget-friendly phone, the one thing my phone wasn’t blessed with was a solid amount of internal storage. So it irritates me tremendously when I’m forced to, once again, play musical chairs with the apps on my phone, weighing up which one (or two or three) I can really afford to part with; and delete, delete, delete!
So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to come up with a few ways to make space on my 16 GB internal storage phone (my memory card is 32 GB) and here’s what’s worked for me and what will hopefully help you if you constantly battle to free up storage space.
Download an app that can help you manage your storage
Yes, your phone probably has a phone manager where you can access the storage clean up panel, but sometimes there are apps that can go beyond telling you how much data is being used by specific apps and allow you to clean up and move some of your media to your external storage.
A recent app I’ve just downloaded for Android is an app called Files Go. This nifty little app, within a few minutes of me using it, moved 1 GB worth of images that have been sitting on my internal storage to my memory card.
Not only that, but it divided my content in sections and within each section showed me what I could free up, the amount that could be freed up and where large files were taking up the most space.
Of course, there are a number of ways you can save on space – the trick is to find the best ways that work for you. You can obviously also set up your phone to back up your media too, say, Google photos or iCloud storage.
Delete your Whatsapp media files + your downloads
You would be surprised at the amount of space that those little video clips and images that are shared in your various Whatsapp groups takes up.
Make sure you regularly purge them from your phone and while you’re at it, go to your downloads folder regularly to delete old files that you no longer need.
These filed may not necessary be huge on their own, but if left in your internal storage for a time long enough to build up, they do end up contributing to the fact that your phone won’t update your other apps.
WATCH: How to free up space on Android smartphone without deleting anything!
Make your SD card your default storage location
If you’ve bought a MicroSD card for some extra space, you can go to your settings and set it up as your default storage location.
The main problem with this, according to How To Geek, is that this actually makes it hard to discern which apps have been moved over or which apps are being installed in your internal storage folders.
I do find that while it has helped me, it hasn’t taken the problem away completely yet, since I’m never sure how my phone decides where to install new apps. I should also add that some of my gaming data reset itself when I did this, so bear that in mind should you be really, really sure you want to change the default storage location.
Oh and do make sure that that you're running on Android Marshmallow or higher.
Additional quick tips:
Want a complete do over and don't mind losing a few stuff that you haven't backed up? Restore your factory settings for a fresh start. That's if you're really desperate and don't want to go through the hassle of deciding what to keep and what to delete.
App taking up data? Go to your app settings, click on a specific app that's consuming data and clear the data and cache for it.
You've heard this before, but seriously, delete apps you're no longer using.
And finally, don't download music files and videos that you can stream (provided that you have enough data of course).
