How To Clean Internal Storage On Phone



Apple gives you 5 GB of iCloud storage with the purchase of one of its devices, and that can fill up fast. Most often, your iCloud storage goes towards backing up your photos, files, voice memos. Learn even more ways to make your phone’s battery last. Clean Storage: If you are worried about your phone being overloaded with unnecessary residual files, it’s about time you clear out your storage. From Settings, swipe to and touch Device care. Touch Storage, and then touch CLEAN NOW to free up storage space.

Though 32GB, 64GB and 128GB of Android internal storage sounds large and adequate for daily use, it easily gets full in few years when you have lots of files piled up on your Android phone/tablet(especially apps and games, which might reach 100MB each). You know, we have dozens of apps installed on Android not to mention videos, music and photos. To avoid slow response, you need to get your Android phone a thorough cleanup. There are different methods provided for Android device users.

Solution 1: Free Up Android Space without Losing Anything

1. Compress photos. The first thing we can do to free up our Android space is to compress Android photos without sacrificing photo quality. There are many photo compressing apps offering for help. You just need to download one on your computer and have photos and videos on your Android device scanned. After that, the app will show you the original size of your photo album and the compressed size.


2. Move apps to SD card. Apps will be installed on your phone by default if you didn't choose to install apps on SD card. To move apps to SD card, you just need to go to 'Settings' > 'Storage' > 'Internal storage' > 'Apps' > find the app > hit on 'CHANGE' > 'SD card' > 'MOVE'.


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Solution 2: Copy Files to PC or Cloud

1. Upload Photos to Google Photos. Google Photos allows you to upload photos onto cloud with either high quality or original one. You can also upload other files and documents to Google Drive and other cloud storage service.


2. Copy Files from Android to Computer. Make sure that the important files you want are included and back up your Android phone. Just simply back them up to your computer with Android data manager. After making sure that your Android phone data is copied, you can delete the photos, videos or music that is not frequently used from your Android. The deleted files are not gone forever, you can recover them back with FonePaw Android Data Recovery anytime you like.


Solution 3: Delete Useless Files or Uninstall Bloatware

1. Clear App Cache. As we use our Android app, some cache files on your Android phone will be added up. To get more space, you have to clear app cache from time to time. Go to 'Settings' > 'Apps' > choose the apps > hit on 'Storage' > 'CLEAR CACHE'.


2. Delete useless file folder. Another way to wipe Android files for more space will be deleting useless folders or files with Android file category direction.

3. Delete useless files with Root Explorer. Install Root Explorer and locate '/data/local' directory. Then, find the folder named 'rights' or 'tmp' and empty the folders. After that, the apps that failed to be installed will be erased.

4. Root Android and remove bloatware. There are many bloatware pre-installed on our Android phone, to get Android phone tidied up, we can root Android phone to get the superuser mode and you can now uninstall pre-install apps by going to 'Settings' > 'Apps' > choose the app > 'UNINSTALL'.


Solution 4: Factory Reset Android Phone

If the methods above don't work for you, you have to try to factory reset your Android phone: Go to 'Settings' > 'Backup & reset' > 'Factory data reset' or flash a new ROM for Android phone to get more Android phone.


As you can see, there are many useful way to free up Android space when the internal phone memory is full. Try them one by one to get more storage for your Samsung Galaxy S7/S6 Edge+/S6, HTC, Sony, Motorola and more Android phone and tablet.

“I’ve made a huge mistake“. When I was buying a secondary Android phone, I went with the 8 GB Moto G model. 8 GB will be more than enough I said to myself, it’s not my main device anyway. I was so wrong. Out of the 8 gigs, only 5 GB are usable. When you use many apps (for testing) and some media, that’s not a lot.

It got so bad that this one time when I was trying to download a storage space analyzer app, I got an error saying I didn’t have enough space left. Oh, the irony.

But in the end I was able to persevere. Using a combination of different apps (yes, yes, adding insult to the injury), uninstalling apps, clearing caches, and being ruthless about downloaded files, I was able to clear more than 1 GB of data in a matter of minutes. To me, that’s a lot.

Read on to find out how I did it. And how you can too.

1. Look Up Storage in Settings

First, go to Settings -> Storage and take a look at what’s taking up so much space. Is it apps, photos, or videos? Tap on an option to see the complete list. Although, deleting files from here is not possible for some reason.

More importantly, tap the Misc option. This lists all the extra files left from apps you uninstalled, old backup files, or any other file type. I found over 1 GB of data taken up by such miscellaneous files. Deleting the old ROM backups, ROM images, and more was an easy way to free the space.

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2. Analyze Storage Using Disk Usage & Storage Analyzer

Sometimes a visual representation of data helps. That’s where Disk Usage & Storage Analyzer comes in. Once the app scans your storage, it will show you a breakdown of your entire storage directory, folder by folder.

It displays this using a branched circle structure. You can use the Directory tab to go deeper into the folders. Tapping a folder/file brings up the Delete option.

3. Clean Cache and Temp Files

If you’re a fan of RSS readers or offline reading apps, app caches can build up pretty fast. I’m talking about a couple hundred MBs here. You can either go to Settings -> Apps, choose the app and clear the cache manually or you can use a cleaner app.

When it comes to cleaner apps, you can either use Clean Master or CCleaner (our review here), Clean Master being the choice of Android veterans.

When you launch Clean Master, you’ll see a Junk Files option. This will include system cache, app caches, system junk files, residual files from old apps and more. You can select what you want to delete. It freed nearly 300 MB using this feature. Not bad for literally 15 seconds of work. As caches build up with time, you’ll have to do this cleaning at set intervals.

4. Upload Photos to Dropbox and Delete Local Copies

Dropbox’s Carousel app has a “Free up phone space” feature (available in Settings) that deletes local copies of photos that are already backed up to Dropbox.

They can be accessed from the Carousel app anytime. Carousel will show thumbnails of all the photos. Tapping them will give you a larger preview. You can save photos from here to local storage as well.

If you want to do this manually, you can. Choose your cloud photo backup service of choice. Upload, then delete the local copies.

5. Do a Manual Sweep with ES File Explorer

There’s nothing better than just having a look around. Grab a full-featured file manager like ES File Explorer and start hunting. Explore the folders from top down. You’re bound to find files and folders taking up unnecessary space.

Check the Downloads folder: Everything you download on your phone will be on the Downloads folder. Over time, it gets easy to ignore this folder while it fills up. I found a couple of apk files and many wallpapers the last time I went looking in my Downloads folder, all of which I could get rid of.

6. Use the Old Fashioned Way: Delete Via PC

If you’re looking for an easier way to manage/delete data from your phone that’s possibly the most reliable way, connect it to a PC. This will list your internal storage as well as external SD card. Browse around, rearrange, and delete anything you don’t need.

7. Batch Uninstall Apps

We’ve talked about the best ways to batch uninstall apps, including Titanium Backup for rooted users. But you can use a cleaner app like Clean Master to uninstall apps as well.

Apps like Facebook and Instagram can take up more than 100 MB of space (not to mention significant battery power). You can consider deleting them and using the website instead.

How To Clear Internal Storage On Iphone 6

8. Do a Factory Reset

We’re talking about taking extreme measures here, but if necessary, you could just do a factory reset and start over fresh. Make sure all your personal data is backed up (to the cloud preferably) before you do this.

How Do You Free Up Storage Space?

What’s your workflow for getting rid of unwanted apps, photos, and files? Let us know in the comments below.


The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.

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