erinptah: (pyramid)
humorist + humanist ([personal profile] erinptah) wrote2023-12-22 06:45 pm
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The phone is dead, long live the phone

My phone has been regularly harassing me for the past month or so to free up more storage space, then eating it right back up again. Not with anything you could easily troubleshoot, either. Last week I deleted the Instagram app — the section of internal storage space labeled “Apps” went down by about 3 GB — and the section labeled “other” went up by almost 3 GB.

(Note that Instagram was already supposed to be running off an SD card! Don’t know why it was squatting on 10% of the main storage space in the first place.)

Welp, last night the thing went mostly-unresponsive. (Had to PM a friend to call out of work on my behalf.) A local tech finally convinced it to reboot, and I finally admitted that I couldn’t keep procrastinating on doing a full wipe-and-reinstall.

Even with a lot of apps/settings backed up and restored automatically, handling the rest took most of the morning.

On the plus side, can’t argue with the results:

Storage breakdown before reinstall, 29.56 of 32 GB used Storage breakdown after reinstall, 15.04 of 32 GB used

Would you look at that. I’m sure the new number for “Apps” is misleadingly small because I haven’t installed/used anything yet, but “System” went down to half its size! Almost 9 GB of cruft wiped clean.

Sure would be nice if the software could figure out how to do that on its own. Or at least have a button I could press for it, instead of hitting “clear cache” half a dozen times every 3 days to free up a few hundred MB, you know?

A lot of apps I just re-downloaded same as I had them before, but I’m trying the nice lightweight Feedly Social Reader as an all-in-one alternative for browsing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Maybe even more platforms, if those all work out. We’ll see.

thesaltinstitute: A digital drawing of a blue-eyed white person with glasses. They're wearing a blue shirt with the hood up; their hair is black and red, cut short with bangs over the forehead. They are making a :3 expression. (bee)

[personal profile] thesaltinstitute 2023-12-23 11:42 am (UTC)(link)

congrats on the new and improved phone storage!!! :3

(for easy cache cleaning we use this app called 1Tap Cleaner which allows u to clean all of ur caches in just a few taps instead of having to hunt it down in separate apps. it doesn't like solve the base problem, but it does make that area in the phone's life cycle where storage is regularly too full but we can't be bothered to actually fix it better rn... easier to bear lol)

axolotls: Drawing of a small axolotl dragon creature on a yellow background. (Default)

[personal profile] axolotls 2023-12-23 08:13 pm (UTC)(link)

Glad you got it fixed!

Yesterday was a day for phone trouble, huh? I lost mine on the bus and will have to be without it for the next three weeks so I can absolutely empathise with needing to get someone else to do calls for you, lol. I wish I had more tips for managing storage, aside from seeing if DiskUsage (also on F-Droid) works to show you what's taking up the space more granularly, but I'm still on quite old Android versions.

lb_lee: M.D. making a shocked, confused face (serious thought)

[personal profile] lb_lee 2023-12-28 01:20 am (UTC)(link)
Sneak: What was it even filling up with???