Jacob Richman's Training Resources

Rev: 10/2025

Phone Storage Problems One morning, when you try to take a photo or film a video or just open an application like Whatsapp, you get a message on your phone that there is "insufficient storage available" or "memory full" or "messages full". In fact, you discover that most of your applications have been working slowly or are not working at all. Backups that usually run automatically at set hours, are no longer working (and you are not aware they stopped). If you never did a cleanup or housekeeping of your phone, you should sit down and start before your phone runs out of storage space. Besides applications that work slowly or do not work at all, one day your phone may not be able to start up. If this is the first time you are cleaning, expect to spend a few hours to review apps, videos, images, etc. After the first time, a few minutes every month will keep your phone (and you) in good health. You should aim to keep 10-15% of your phone's storage free. Have a minimum of 500 MB to 1 GB, to ensure smooth performance. This space allows for temporary files, app updates, and system operations like caching and swap files.

The following tips work on the Android operating system. The tips were checked on my Galaxy A25 Smartphone with Android 15 and User Interface (UI) 7. The screen captures may look slightly different on your version of Android. You can view your phone model at: Settings --> About Phone FYI: The setting Icon is an image of a gear If you cannot find the setting icon on your home screen, the setting icon is also located on the top right of the Quick Panel / Quick settings . Swipe down from the right top of your screen to open the Quick Panel. This panel also has Wifi, airport mode, flashlight functions. You can view your User Interface (UI) and Android versions at: Settings --> About Phone --> Software Information There is a "Geting Started" Guide to your phone under: Settings --> User Guide The page links to a website with a list of online topics. Looks good, but I prefer having a full manual as a PDF to read on my computer versus reading online on my phone. Search the Internet for a PDF of your specific phone model manual. If you cannot find it, ask the person who sold you the phone to send it to you. Specify the language. There are separate Hebrew and English manuals. The manuals are free and usually in PDF format. (The full manual / user guide, not just a starter guide). If they are too big for email or Whatsapp, use Google drive. Most manuals have a table of contents, so you do not have to read all 100+ pages. The manuals are not on the Amazon "best sellers" list, but you may learn about useful functions that you did not know about. The English Samsung A25 User Manual for Android 16 is located at: https://www.samsung.com/ie/support/model/SM-A256BZKDEUB/ (PDF, 146 pages, 3.3 meg)

Tips to Free Up Phone Storage 1. Check your phone's storage stats Settings --> Device Care --> Storage (click on the "storage" word to open manage storage) Press on any of the topics to get more details 2. Uninstall unused apps Remove apps you don't use anymore. You can always download them again later if needed. However, remember, if you uninstall the app, all data, passwords and settings of the app will be erased. As you can see in the image above, I have 1.96 gigabytes of apps that I have not used in 30 days. If I click on it, I will get a list of the apps and I can decide if I should uninstall each. If you have been trying out all kinds of new apps and you decided they are not suitable for you, always remember to uninstall.

3. Clear app caches Clearing cache removes temporary data and files that build up over time without deleting your important data. Settings --> Apps -- > select an app --> then go to Storage Tap Clear Cache. Repeat this for several apps. Do Not click on clear data. I discovered my "Chrome" app cache takes up 1.79 gigabytes of storage space. If your phone has under 1 gigabytle of free space, cleaning this cache will give you breathing room. Take note that after a few weeks it will accumulate again. However, I think this 1.79 gigabyte accumulation was from several months. I just asked Google why the Chrome cache gets so large. Here is the answer: "Faster loading: Chrome stores files from websites to load them faster on repeat visits, rather than having to download everything from the server again. Static files: The more you browse, the more images, scripts, and other static content a website downloads and stores as cache. Offline data: Some sites, like Google Search or certain Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), can store data for offline use. Browsing history and cookies: While not part of the cache itself, these are often deleted along with it and also take up storage space. Corrupted data: Occasionally, corrupted data can cause the cache to become unusually large." After Chrome, I would check all your social media apps and messaging apps and then your other apps. Some caches may be small and some may be big. Remember, clear cache not data.

4. Videos, audio files and images If you have been accumulating hundreds of videos and images over the year, you should be aware that they take up storage space. This is especially true of the video files that take up the most space. I would recommend that once a month you copy all the images and videos from your phone to your computer and/or disk on key and only keep the ones you really actively use on your phone. I connect my phone to my computer via the USB cable and use Internet Explorer (windows key + "e" to launch) to view the directories / files on my phone. When you connect the phone and open explorer on your PC, you will see your phone as a separate drive (like "d:" or "e:"). Sometimes you may not see any directories or files. If that happens, disconnect the phone and reconnect and pay attention to see if there is a notification on your phone to allow access to your phone for file transfers. Agree. You will now see a list of folders and files. I tend to "copy" the videos and images to both my pc and a disk-on-key before deleting them from the phone. Check the PC and disk-on-key that the files copied ok. I do not use the "move" files command because if things go bad during a "move" I can lose the files. Here are some of the directories that have many of your files: DCIM --> Camera Download Documents Videos Pictures Music The directories below are related to your Whatsapp app on your phone. Users that are not interested in managing files via their PC, can skip down to the section on Whatsapp's Storage Management. Android --> Media --> com.whatsapp --> WhatsApp --> Media --> WhatsApp Images --> WhatsApp Video --> WhatsApp Audio --> WhatsApp Documents etc... Each of the directories above will also have a "sent" subdirectory. For every video you "sent" in Whatsapp to 10 friends, there may be 10 copies in the sent directory. Now you know where a lot of your storage space is going. If you decide to directly delete any videos via the Internet Explorer and not through Whatsapps own file storage manager (separate section below), when you open the chat of your friend in whatsapp the videos will be greyed out and if you try to play them it will say "missing". Some people may want to track exactly what they sent to each friend. The cost is phone storage. To save hours of reviewing hundreds of images and videos I tend copy the whole directories to my PC and will sort them one day. I copy also to a external disk or disk-on-key because at some point, a few years from now, some of the media will no longer work. Yes, disk-on-keys and other media are not forever media. My opinion: Important documents and media should be kept on at least 2 different media sources. Back to Whatsapp. Settings --> Device Care --> Storage (click on the "storage" word to open manage storage) In the image above you can see that I only have 594 megabytes of images. I copied and deleted hundreds of images and many videos twice this year. If you are active on Whatsapp or you take many photos with your phone's camera, you may have gigabytes of images. Consider spending a few hours a month erasing stuff you do not need or copying them off your phone. Why do I have over 3 gigabytes of audio files on my phone? I rarely use the audio in Whatsapp but I have hundreds of mp3 music files that I copied from my computer to my phone. I use the free VLC media player on my PC and the VLC app on my phone. I have 3.69 Gigabytes of videos. Part of the videos on my phone are from Whatsapp groups and part are MP4 music videos that I accumulated over the years. Every so often I clean up the video section via the Whatsapp storage management functions. See the Whatsapp section below.

5. Whatsapp Storage Management There are over 3 billion active Whatsapp users in the world who are sending and receiving billions of photos and images every day. Your smartphone, like many others, may have hundreds of photos and videos that take up most of the storage room on your phone. Some of the groups you joined are sending you videos and photos that you do not even want. Do you really need to keep everything from the groups and your past on your phone? If you are automatically backing up to Google every day or week (which is good!), if you exceed the storage limit of 15 gigabytes, you will be asked, for a small yearly fee, if you want to increase your limit. Why not copy the old videos and photos to your pc and/or disk-on-key (in fact make two copies of very important items) and then erase them from your phone. Whatsapp has storage management functions to help you declutter. On the main chat menu, click on the top three vertical dots in the right top corner. Choose Settings --> Storage and Data --> Manage Storage It may take up to a minute for the system to display all the information, depending on how many files you have. Per the image above, all my Whatsapp files take up 2.3 gigabytes. Every night at 2am I have my Whatsapp backup copy any new files to my Google drive. I try to clean up my phone every few weeks, so my Whatsapp storage is relatively small. That does not mean it is perfect. I have 1.5 gigabytes of files over 5 megabytes (mostly short videos I received or sent to friends). If you click on any of the small images, the next screen will display the individual videos. This display does not show you from which chat / friend they are located. If you double click on the video it will play. If you want to delete a video (or several) click once on each video. A checkmark will appear on the video(s). You can then press the garbage can icon on the top of the screen. You will notice that there are 5 copies of the same video of a person being interviewed on an orange couch. I can mark all 5 (if you like the video, keep one). Depends on how many videos are listed, you may want to spend a few hours (with breaks of course) to do some major deleting. If you go back to the Manage Storage page, and scroll down, you will see all your chat relatives and friends. You can go into each one and review / cleanup items that are big and no longer needed. As I mentioned before, you may have joined groups that are very active and send out many videos. By default, when the video is sent to you, it automatically downloads to your phone even before you view it. You can stop the automatic downloads when you are using your cellphone provider or Wifi. These settngs are very important for those living outside of Israel. In Israel, we pay our cellphone service provider the cheapest rate in the world for data transfer. It comes out to 2 cents per gigabyte. The next cheapest is India at 9 cents per gigabyte. Per Google: The average price for 1GB of mobile data in the USA is around $2.75 to $6.00. This is one of the reasons that Whatsapp is so popular in Israel and less popular in the USA. On the bottom of the Manage Storage screen, you will see the setting for automatic downloads. Change the setting to what you think is best for you. One last item about Whatsapp groups. I am on many active groups that sometimes send up to 20 messages a day. If I see something interesting, I download the video or image to my phone or forward the message to one of my own single user groups (like folders). After I saved or forwarded what I wanted to keep, I clear the chat. On your main chat window, find and click into your group. On the top right of the screen will be 3 dots. Click on them and you get a list of options. Choose the last one called "more". The top one is "Clear chat". If you have an important chat that you want to save outside of Whatsapp, you can export the chat which is the second function on the menu. For those smiling....export first before clearing.

6. RAM Plus OK.....the following paragraph is mostly from Google: "RAM Plus is a feature on Samsung devices that uses a portion of the phone's internal storage to act as virtual RAM, which can improve multitasking and app performance. It works by allocating storage space to function as virtual memory, allowing more apps to stay open in the background or launch faster. However, this virtual RAM is slower than physical RAM, and the benefits can vary depending on the device. " My summary: By default your Samsung phone is using part of your phone storage area as a temporary workspace. It will allow you to have many applications running at the same time but it will cost you storage space. If you are short of storage space and you do not mind running fewer programs at the same time, you can turn off RAM Plus. Settings --> Device Care --> Memory --> RAM Plus There is an on / off slider switch. If it is on, you have a choice of 2, 4, 6 gigabytes. If you change a setting or turn it on or off, you need to turn your phone off and turn it back on to have the change go into affect.

I hope you benefited from this storage tutorial.
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