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Hi all, hopefully some of the more knowledgeable Android tweakers venture out of the Dev forums for a peek here and render some help. I know they get rather pissy if you post questions in there.
I figured I could free up some space if I removed stock apps I didn't use. I have a full licence for Docs To-Go so having QuickOffice pre-installed is a pain.
I followed a guide to move the .apk and .odex from /system/app to a spare SD card and looking at the files in total they combine to be about 6MB in size.
The funny thing is after a restart of my phone I'm no better off in terms of storage space...in fact I lost a couple of MBs!
So, for those in the know...what really IS the deal with the internal storage space?
Aitese said:
Hi all, hopefully some of the more knowledgeable Android tweakers venture out of the Dev forums for a peek here and render some help. I know they get rather pissy if you post questions in there.
I figured I could free up some space if I removed stock apps I didn't use. I have a full licence for Docs To-Go so having QuickOffice pre-installed is a pain.
I followed a guide to move the .apk and .odex from /system/app to a spare SD card and looking at the files in total they combine to be about 6MB in size.
The funny thing is after a restart of my phone I'm no better off in terms of storage space...in fact I lost a couple of MBs!
So, for those in the know...what really IS the deal with the internal storage space?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
there is few benefits to removing stock apps, stock apps are stored on the /system/ partition as you know, the device dosent use this for anything except the os, stock app and other system related items like, .lib files and the kernel, the portion we have as useable data is on the /data/ partiton, so removing apps from /system/ just free's up space on that partiton.
now here are two possible benifits, i removed most of the stock apps, and media files from system to free up enough space, i then did a nandroid backup, and flashed the alpharev sence hboot, giving my device there new partiton tables, it reduce the size of the system partiton, giving me a much bigger /cache/ and a bit more space on /data/ or if you dont want to remove as menny stock apps as me, you can just remove a few, see how much space is in /system/ then using the tut in development, modify you own partition table, removing the free space from /system/ and adding it to /data/, you need s-off to do all this
^ Is it just me or is that very complicated
Thanks AndroHero, that's cleared it up quite a bit.
I've been wanting to make a larger /data partition on a Droid Incredible. I mean, after all, it comes with a lot of storage. But there is not nearly enough for apps. Sure. I can use my SD card. But unless there is something I'm not aware of, you can only install some apps to the SD and even when you do, pieces of that app still exist in /data. But what's even worse is the fact that I already use my SD card for movies and videos and such and I just don't really use the unclaimed space of which there is plenty, in the phone, for that sort of thing and yet I can't use it to install apps. I haven't found too much on this topic outside of using App2SD. I did find a lot of talk of using parted and even gparted. But this talk is generally about partitioning your SD card. If I were to use parted or gparted to resize the /data partition at the expense of another partition's space and I did it properly, would the Android system not boot because of it? And if this is doable, is there a better, easier way to do it than using parted and adb or gparted? Also, is there a guide for resizing your /data partition? I could probably survive without one if I had to but it would really be helpful just in case there are some big DO NOT DO's that should be avoided that aren't obvious. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
enigmatl said:
I've been wanting to make a larger /data partition on a Droid Incredible. I mean, after all, it comes with a lot of storage. But there is not nearly enough for apps. Sure. I can use my SD card. But unless there is something I'm not aware of, you can only install some apps to the SD and even when you do, pieces of that app still exist in /data. But what's even worse is the fact that I already use my SD card for movies and videos and such and I just don't really use the unclaimed space of which there is plenty, in the phone, for that sort of thing and yet I can't use it to install apps. I haven't found too much on this topic outside of using App2SD. I did find a lot of talk of using parted and even gparted. But this talk is generally about partitioning your SD card. If I were to use parted or gparted to resize the /data partition at the expense of another partition's space and I did it properly, would the Android system not boot because of it? And if this is doable, is there a better, easier way to do it than using parted and adb or gparted? Also, is there a guide for resizing your /data partition? I could probably survive without one if I had to but it would really be helpful just in case there are some big DO NOT DO's that should be avoided that aren't obvious. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
theres around 780mb in there thats not enough?
JoelZ9614 said:
theres around 780mb in there thats not enough?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
He's talking about /data/data/ which is like 150mb, I use the NotEnoughSpace app it lets you store data on cache, emmc, sd card, you should check it out.
Well, I messed with notenoughspace too which was my eason for posting. This was the app that made me say enough is enough, can I just resize /data/data?.
-1- So much space on the incredible is going to waste while programs such as these would have me put apps on the SD where I really do want space for my other stuff like music and movies.
-2- Unless I missed a button or option, NotEnoughSpace came off as annoying to me. I would go into apps and wait for a minute for it to scan every time I do it and then I pick an app, for example Beejive. It makes me move it ONE FILE AT A TIME. And even then, there is stuff you can't move. Can I not just move the app, all of it in one click?
But most importantly, I just want more space on /data/data. I want to resize the partition. The phone has what, 8 gigs on it and allows 150 mb for apps in there which is just crazy.
Can I resize the partition where apps are stored (/data/data) by way of parted or gparted? to avoid the annoyance of using my external storage which I want to use for movies and music? There's probably 6 or so gigs on my phone I'll never use for media that should be meant for apps.
Has anybody resized the data partition? Are there consequences to doing it if it's done properly? Is there a guide? What is the easiest way to do this? Any help would be appreciated.
enigmatl said:
Well, I messed with notenoughspace too which was my eason for posting. This was the app that made me say enough is enough, can I just resize /data/data?.
-1- So much space on the incredible is going to waste while programs such as these would have me put apps on the SD where I really do want space for my other stuff like music and movies.
-2- Unless I missed a button or option, NotEnoughSpace came off as annoying to me. I would go into apps and wait for a minute for it to scan every time I do it and then I pick an app, for example Beejive. It makes me move it ONE FILE AT A TIME. And even then, there is stuff you can't move. Can I not just move the app, all of it in one click?
But most importantly, I just want more space on /data/data. I want to resize the partition. The phone has what, 8 gigs on it and allows 150 mb for apps in there which is just crazy.
Can I resize the partition where apps are stored (/data/data) by way of parted or gparted? to avoid the annoyance of using my external storage which I want to use for movies and music? There's probably 6 or so gigs on my phone I'll never use for media that should be meant for apps.
Has anybody resized the data partition? Are there consequences to doing it if it's done properly? Is there a guide? What is the easiest way to do this? Any help would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ask conap hes good with this type of thing
Making progress but still need help.
There's some talk on the net that you can modify the size of the .img files that nandroid makes and simply flash them back to your phone.
Problem is, I can't find a windows way to do it on the net. The closest that I've come is a program called toporesize. This program will let you open files such as data.img from your nandroid backup. But you can't resize them because you get an error box that says this appears to not be an ext* filesystem. Check size file only to resize the file or use other tools. I'm assuming that means it wants you to check a button that says resize file only no resize2fs. In the one guide I found that talks about this app, it says do not check this box. So I'm assuming if you did, it would work and then when you flashed the file back to your phone, it would either not boot or the size would not be changed properly.
I also noted that there's a thread or two that has posted some custom sized data.img files for download. I would do this as a last resort but would prefer to resize my own data.img for a more precise choice of how large I want it.
The error mentions other tools. Are there other tools or programs for Windows users?
Does anybody have any insight on resizing the /data/data partition either by this method, by using parted/gparted, or any other method that works effectively?
I would avoid trying to alter the size of the partitions on your phone. That is how you end up with a brick. There are other ways including finding out which apps are taking up all of your space. 150 MB does not sound like a lot, but it is considering what is stored there.
Go into Manage Applications and click on the All tab. Then press the menu key and sort by size. Click on the apps near the top with anything higher than 3 or 4 MB. Look at the details in the storage section for each app. You will see a Data line item. If it is really high in proportion of the size of the Application, you should clear it. That will save you a lot of space.
In the case of the Mail app or other social networking apps like Facebook or Twitter, you can go into the settings and restrict how much data is stored on the phone. They can really eat up space by downloading a month of emails, etc ...
ihtfp69 said:
I would avoid trying to alter the size of the partitions on your phone. That is how you end up with a brick. There are other ways including finding out which apps are taking up all of your space. 150 MB does not sound like a lot, but it is considering what is stored there.
Go into Manage Applications and click on the All tab. Then press the menu key and sort by size. Click on the apps near the top with anything higher than 3 or 4 MB. Look at the details in the storage section for each app. You will see a Data line item. If it is really high in proportion of the size of the Application, you should clear it. That will save you a lot of space.
In the case of the Mail app or other social networking apps like Facebook or Twitter, you can go into the settings and restrict how much data is stored on the phone. They can really eat up space by downloading a month of emails, etc ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This request is meant with respect and NOT as a flame but I have to make this request so others don't follow and potentially change the thread into a debate on whether to resize or not resize the partition.
Please let's not start talking about whether this is a good idea or not nor if doing this can make our phone into a brick. Now that it's been said, those lurking and considering this for themselves can make up their own minds. But there are a lot of things talked about throughout XDA that can make your phone into a brick yet things are done in the name of making our devices better.
And yes. We can take action to reduce the amount of data that apps are taking up. To tell you the truth, I would do that even if I had a 1GB partition. I think always saving space when space can be saved is a good idea.
But just in principle, I and probably others want to reclaim that space on our phones that will never be used by anything. Maybe HTC allocated the space as it's allocated because some users won't use an SD card and will then use that space for their media and other miscellaneous stuff.
But once you have an SD card that's way bigger than the extra space on your phone, it becomes pointless to use that space on your phone for media. So I want it available for data.
So both sides of whether to do this or not have now been posed. I ask can we please get back to the topic of how to though I do thank you for your input.
That said, again, does anybody know how to resize your data partition whether by doing it live with parted or gparted or by editing the data.img file that nandroid via clockwork mod puts out? I would really appreciate it.
I tried making a nandroid backup of the phone through clockworkmod, sending the data.img file to my computer, using toporesize to resize it. And by the way, I was forced to check the resize file only no resize2fs button as not doing this generated an error. I then used md5sum to get an md5sum for the new data.img. I then inserted the md5sum in clockwork/nandroid's nandroid.md5 file (with a linux file compatable text editor). I then sent the entire backup back to the phone in a different clockworkmod/backup folder, used rom manager to restore, selected the new resized backup.
After the flashing was complete, I went into my phone only to find that the data partition still had the same amount free (give or take a few K). I wondered if that's because I had to shrink the system file? I was thinking before I started that it's probable that I would have to shrink another partition that had free space so I chose system. I attempted to repeat the above steps from the beginning this time with the plan of shrinking system.img.
No go. toporesize will not shrink it properly. Errors are reported in the process though when I reload it into toporesize, it looks like it has the size I want. Knowing it would probably fail, I tried to continue anyway. Even with the correct md5sum, nandroid won't even start the recovery of that set. You get a status bar for a second and then, the phone just reboots.
So for now, I'm at a loss but I know this can be done.
Whether using this method or another, does anybody know how to properly change the size of the data partition using WINDOWS?
Don't come crying when you brick it.
ihtfp69 said:
Don't come crying when you brick it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have no intentions of such. -1- I will quite likely never brick it as nandroid pretty much has me covered. But if I do, -2- I don't plan on having this phone forever. It's not new any more. There are already several models that are better than the droid incredible that I'm looking at. If I were to brick this phone, yay. Good excuse to buy a new phone. But, odds are, i'll never brick it and come November or December, I'll buy something else anyhow.
So please, this isn't about the risks, of course you can brick your phone trying this or many other things on XDA.
Does anyone know how to resize the data partition using any method that can be done with the help of a Windows machine?
This is a fundamental change to a very sensitive area you have
276 mb for the system rom and 748mb for user apps.Many rom devs seem to be straining to keep the rom below 200mb and it is amazingly easy to fill up 748 mb with little apps.
I would think if it were possible to do this it would have been done by the rom devs first thing. I would love to see a rom dev bump this to 500mb and 1024mb.
Chances are to re partition the partitions on the phones memory is not possible with out a hboot flash or something of a custom bootloader...
I find removing these help... Also i use handcent and gmail.app instead of the stock apps...
friendstream
peep
twitter
flicker
stocks app
facebook
748 mb? I only have 150 available in /data/data. How do you get 748?
enigmatl said:
748 mb? I only have 150 available in /data/data. How do you get 748?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
748mb is the size of the entire /data partition what us devs are doing with the new roms is symlinking things to the /system from /data i've managed to do it without symlinking but it bring the /system to its limits and thats usually not good to do
enigmatl said:
748 mb? I only have 150 available in /data/data. How do you get 748?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In my /data/data i have 95.96 MB free
rom 35MB free
app space 212 MB free
internal 6.44GB free
Also /data/data is a different partition than /data so the 150 is not included as part of the 748.
Resize /data/data partition - Update?
Did you ever find a solution to resizing the HTC Incredible's partitions?
I too am fed up with having to constantly clear caches and uninstalled apps, just because the tiny 150MB partition fills up. It's been a problem since my wife and I bought our phones.
I expect it would have to be done by a custom bootloader, but thought I would check and see if you had any success.
If nandroid recreates the partition tables based on the sizes of the .img partition backups, then they could probably be resized by mounting the .IMG files directly under Linux and using Linux tools to resize each one - or - creating a new .img partition of the new size(s), mount the backups and copy everything over to the new one, unmount it and go from there?
Steve
Have you used the Ext4 mod created by Tiny and Jermaine151?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1623038
...and the following is the original thread which has the details of what exactly the mod does:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1315372
If I'm reading this (outdated) thread correctly, this mod is what you're looking for in regards to partitioning /data/data. The second link is provided in the OP of my first link.
SlimSnoopOS said:
Have you used the Ext4 mod created by Tiny and Jermaine151?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1623038
...and the following is the original thread which has the details of what exactly the mod does:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1315372
If I'm reading this (outdated) thread correctly, this mod is what you're looking for in regards to partitioning /data/data. The second link is provided in the OP of my first link.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What he said ^^^^
Just do it.
Ill try to keep this question as neat and tidy as possible. I am asking because this is just barely out of my scope of knowledge.
In linux OS's you can create hardlinks and softlinks (symlinks) in any directory that point to one specific file without that file actually existing in duplicate and taking up more space.
I was wondering if through a command line android environment (on rooted device of course) is it possible to move files to another location or drive (external SD) and trick the OS into thinking things are in place by using either hard or soft links? And if yes that could work, is this how titanium backup works?
Thanks for the info, just trying to further my knowledge base.
Of course, Android is a Linux OS pretty much like every other, as far as the filesystem goes anyway. It's the same EXT4 that's used on workstations, with the same features and limitations. "ln -s" and "ln" work just the same (depending on whether your busybox is correctly built or not, but that's another issue).
But that's rather how abn app like Link2SD works. Titanium backs up the .apk files plus a .tar file containing the settings of the app (contained in the /data/data directory).
Titanium backup is also used on rooted phones to "move" apps to SD. I'm kinda curious about how it does that. Thanks for that app suggestion, seems like a nice clean way to do some things. And thanks for the input too.
Sent from my MOTWX435KT using Tapatalk
Titanium and Link2SD work in pretty much the same way : they move the .apk of the app from /data/app to the SD, the data from /data/data and make a few symlinks (plus a few other things, like the dalvik cache contents) to make the OS think they're still in the same place, there's not much more to it than this
Awesome input. Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
So with a little research I may play with attempting to move some things around if I can learn about the dalvik machine a little more. And my friends used to shake their head at my tinkering with Linux..... lol
Sent from my MOTWX435KT using Tapatalk
yeah, I get the same look from my dumbwit work colleagues..
They don't understand what we all know.. ^^ They even banned me from having my phone on my desk, fanatic fools...
Hello everyone,
I've been trying several different roms and I found my free space dropped to 1.7 gb on the internal memory. Is there any way to make sure I get the original free space back? Like formatting the partition and flashing a Rom or something like that? I've tried wiping caches and such, but I still think I've lost like 3gb out of nowhere. Although I would like to know what the average free storage space is first.
Please help a total noob!
Thanx
I assume you haven't deleted the old roms off your phone?
If you plug it in via usb you can view the storage that way (in mac [android file transfer]/linux/win). Just delete any roms you're not using etc.
It seems that you need to erase your storage to get it back. When flashing rom we didn't do storage format, files and folder from old rom remain there. This folder could be your content like music and pictures, also some remaining app folder
If you use a Linux computer to delete files on your sdcard then check your sdcard for a .Trash directory (the name might be different, like .Trash-1000). Even though you thought you deleted some files they just got moved to .Trash and are still there taking up space. If you delete the .Trash directory it will really get rid of those files and give you more space.
true
erwinpiero said:
It seems that you need to erase your storage to get it back. When flashing rom we didn't do storage format, files and folder from old rom remain there. This folder could be your content like music and pictures, also some remaining app folder
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're totally right. I just deleted some old files from games I don't even have like FIFA.
Hi guys,
on my HTC One X I've got under App Storage 4.79 GB used on 6.76 GB total and under Phone Storage 1.40 GB used on 25.24 GB total.
This is the situation just after I installed a new custom rom on the phone, so without any application from the market or pictures, music and videos!
So why my phone has 4.72 GB of "other" in the App Storage? Is it a bug? Can I fix it?
Hope someone knows how to get all that GB back.
Thank You!
use astro file manager. you will see what file is inside that "other".
David3D said:
Hi guys,
on my HTC One X I've got under App Storage 4.79 GB used on 6.76 GB total and under Phone Storage 1.40 GB used on 25.24 GB total.
This is the situation just after I installed a new custom rom on the phone, so without any application from the market or pictures, music and videos!
So why my phone has 4.72 GB of "other" in the App Storage? Is it a bug? Can I fix it?
Hope someone knows how to get all that GB back.
Thank You!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I never really checked what those 4 plus GB are, maybe system files? but I'm pretty sure it's normal. I see some other guys asked this question, and also my phone has similar data usage.
Not sure if you've solved this yet, but if you grab SD Maid off of the play store you can use that to find out what's taking up all the space. It's also pretty useful in general for clearing out junk files etc.
I've downloaded SD Maid and I can see 328Mb in /data and 624Mb in /system. These together with the small folders are gonna make not more than 700Mb in total, so the 4Gb must be in the folder /sys that SD Maid doesn't even scan. I have also noticed some loops in the /sys folder, something like enter in a subfolder and find yourself in another directory always inside /sys but in a different location. What should this folder contain?
Someone else might have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the /sys directory just contains android system files, so I doubt your phone would be too happy if it had glitched out enough to start duplicating files in there.
Did you wipe external storage before installing the rom? Could be that it's just leftover files on the sd card from apps you had installed on the previous rom.
Might be a bit of an extreme solution, but you could backup all your apps, messages etc, migrate the backups across to your pc then wipe absolutely everything from recovery before doing a fresh install of the rom. I know twrp recovery lets you wipe the system partition and external storage as well as the regular stuff (cache, dalvik etc), so just blitz the phone and start fresh. Should be a pretty fail-safe fix, just make sure you transfer everything you want to keep onto the pc before wiping, ready to be transferred back afterwards.
When you press advanced view on SD Maids first page, it will show you all found partitions.
/sys is mostlikely not the issue here.
I'm not sure how the partitions are set up on your device, but usually installing a new ROM does not wipe the internal sdcard location.
Where are the 25GB "Phone storage" located ? on the internal sdcard?
I'm not an expert but I don't think that the folder /sys contains android system files, or better it probably does but not 4 GB otherwise all the HTC One X should have the App Storage full of 4 GB of system files, instead seems to be just a problem of few phones. When I installed the custom ROM I did wipe everything, format all the folders and try to make the phone as clean as possible but the GB are still there.
SD Maid doesn't show me the /sys folder, and if I put together all the others folders that it shows to me the total amount doesn't reach the 4 GB, more like 800 Mb.
The HTC One X has two storages, "App Storage" (6.76GB total) and "Phone Storage" (25.24GB total). App Storage is the one where the kernel and rom are installed and that most of the applications doesn't touch, while the Phone Storage is like a normal SD Card for the other phones that can be formatted etc.
Same here.. "It's not a bug, it's a feature"
Is there an application able to make a file log of what is inside a folder? I was thinking that maybe someone who doesn't have this problem, could make a file log with the list of folders and files of the directory /sys and so we can see what does mach and what does not...
:good:
you thanked yourself???
You should be able to just extract the information from the ROM you have installed.
timbo1969 said:
you thanked yourself???
You should be able to just extract the information from the ROM you have installed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No it was not my intention to thank myself, it was just to push up the conversation
Do you know how to extract these informations? From the ROM or from an application? I'm on OrDroid 12.5.3 at the moment.
Thanks
Hi,
I reached to your post after many hours of googling. Did you ever get any solution of your problem. I'm asking because i have the exact same problem in app storage - other. Other got 4.90GB of my App storage.
Please let me know.
Thanks for your time.
--HTC one X
My storage windows looks just like yours too, dunno if its meant to be like that. Prob just the system files for the OS but we can see if as used space in the new rom where as we didn't before.
David3D said:
Is there an application able to make a file log of what is inside a folder? I was thinking that maybe someone who doesn't have this problem, could make a file log with the list of folders and files of the directory /sys and so we can see what does mach and what does not...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse