Good morning, SF.

Lately my Samsung S7 (32GB) has been giving me a warning about being "dangerously full" or some such. I'm curious what hogs up over 31GB of my 32 available. The 128 card inside is very empty.

Let's start with the basics: I have very few non-original apps loaded -- I'm not one of those people who grabs every new and cool app available. I don't store any music on the phone. I have all but about eight photos stored on the card, and it's set to store new pics on the card. I set everything I can to use the card rather than the phone's internal storage.

A quick trip through the My Files app shows there's not much vthoky-initiated data there. I can link the phone to the computer by USB and use Windows' file manager. Doing so, I scroll through all the folders I can find and there's next to nothing there. But then there's this: if I highlight all the folders that show, right-click, and choose Properties, there's something less than 500MB counted. Is the remaining pile-o-storage invisible to the user? I understand there's operating system and all that, and the makers don't want users dinking with that. But how big is that collection of files? If the built-in is over 30GB, then why bother offering consumers a 32GB phone?

The short of it is the collection of files I can see is pretty darned small, so I'm having trouble figuring why the phone tells me it's almost full.

Thank you in advance for your help.

If you can find the room, try loading a native Android storage app like the ones here: 10 Storage management apps for Andriod

If I had to guess, especially if you've had it for years and never cleaned out the 'cache' files, you could have lots of detritus to clean out to free up space.

You probably have a bunch of old updates still sitting on the phone, they can be gigabytes each.

It's an S7, so there has been the S8, S9, S10, S20, and now the S21 since, so its several years old at this point. My suggestion...1) Copy any user data you have to your removable SD card and remove it, then 2) Do a factory reset on the phone essentially wiping it. Then 3) Setup the phone again from scratch and restore any data you feel is necessary. That 'should' get you a decent functioning phone again. Hopefully it will also allow the phone to run faster again.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
You probably have a bunch of old updates still sitting on the phone, they can be gigabytes each.

This makes sense. Can they be accessed and deleted directly?

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
It's an S7, so there has been the S8, S9, S10, S20, and now the S21 since, so its several years old at this point. My suggestion...1) Copy any user data you have to your removable SD card and remove it, then 2) Do a factory reset on the phone essentially wiping it. Then 3) Setup the phone again from scratch and restore any data you feel is necessary. That 'should' get you a decent functioning phone again. Hopefully it will also allow the phone to run faster again.

I'm not opposed to this method.
- What's a good tool for backing up the entire device locally first? (I don't trust the cloud.)
- If I factory reset it, there will be a ton of updates afterward, right? Will that lead right back to the situation PAsig mentions?

I dont know if the s7 allows you to mount a sd card as internal(Adoptable Storage) but you can see. Go the the bottom of this page to see if it will work. https://www.androidheadlines.c...storage-android.html What this will do is add the sd card memory to the 32Gig.

Not particularly familiar with the S7 but i have an S8 and will check it at soonest.
My Android Huawei has a storage manager app and i regularly use it to get rid of useless crap. Try finding something similar on your S7 and/or maybe try you antivirus program. Some have the cleanup function or a link to the one that came with the phone.

Another thing is you can use your phone settings to tell it to use the SD card as main storage while you figure out what is clogging the main storage.

Google says go to Settings-Battery & … care and then optimize the storage and memory from there.

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