Phone Storage Full? but It's NOT.

[2010 ZR1]

I'm getting a message stating that my Phone Storage is full. It's not. It's got tons of space (phone and SD card both are very free). This happened before and I took my Incredible into the Verizon store. The employees were stumped, said I probably got a virus, then rebooted my phone. Lost everything :\

It's happened again. I tried deleting all my apps and texts but still getting the message. I have videos and photos that I want to save before rebooting my phone. How do I move them to my SD card from my phone (without using a computer)?

Please help! Very frustrated...

I ran into a similar problem when I was trying to use doubletwist to sync my iTunes music to my phone storage. I was experimenting with various playlists and noticed that my music was being duplicated on the device. I mounted the device (HTC Incredible) as a drive and manually deleted the music files. Amazingly this did not result in an increase of the available drive space. Eventually, (way too long) I figured out that there are several hidden directories on the phone storage. One of them is called ".Trashes". In that directory there is another directory called "501". Looking there I saw all of the songs that I thought I deleted. It turns out they were just moved to .Trashes/501/. Again manually, I deleted all of the directories under the 501 directory and voila I had all my storage space back.

So long story short, if you run into this again try emptying your .Trashes.

--JJP

Where did you find the .trashes folder exactly?

 

[JJPIV]

I'm getting a message stating that my Phone Storage is full. It's not. It's got tons of space (phone and SD card both are very free). This happened before and I took my Incredible into the Verizon store. The employees were stumped, said I probably got a virus, then rebooted my phone. Lost everything :\

It's happened again. I tried deleting all my apps and texts but still getting the message. I have videos and photos that I want to save before rebooting my phone. How do I move them to my SD card from my phone (without using a computer)?

Please help! Very frustrated...

I ran into a similar problem when I was trying to use doubletwist to sync my iTunes music to my phone storage. I was experimenting with various playlists and noticed that my music was being duplicated on the device. I mounted the device (HTC Incredible) as a drive and manually deleted the music files. Amazingly this did not result in an increase of the available drive space. Eventually, (way too long) I figured out that there are several hidden directories on the phone storage. One of them is called ".Trashes". In that directory there is another directory called "501". Looking there I saw all of the songs that I thought I deleted. It turns out they were just moved to .Trashes/501/. Again manually, I deleted all of the directories under the 501 directory and voila I had all my storage space back.

So long story short, if you run into this again try emptying your .Trashes.

--JJP

Where did you find the .trashes folder exactly?

The .Trashes folder is at the root of both the phone storage and the sd card. It is a hidden directory so if you have the device drives mounted and are looking for it in explorer you will have to enable view hidden files. I use a Mac so I was able to view the drive through the Terminal and use the "ls -al" command to see the full directory list. (This is how I found it to start.)

After some more exploration last night I found the "ES File Explorer" app that lets you see all of the files on the device. Once you install ES, configure it to see hidden files. Open the app, and navigate to settings -> file settings then check "Show Hidden Files." Once you do that you will need to go to / for device storage or /sdcard/ for the sd card storage. You should then be able to see the .Trashes directories on your device and the sd card respectively.

--JJP

 

[2010 ZR1]

I ran into a similar problem when I was trying to use doubletwist to sync my iTunes music to my phone storage. I was experimenting with various playlists and noticed that my music was being duplicated on the device. I mounted the device (HTC Incredible) as a drive and manually deleted the music files. Amazingly this did not result in an increase of the available drive space. Eventually, (way too long) I figured out that there are several hidden directories on the phone storage. One of them is called ".Trashes". In that directory there is another directory called "501". Looking there I saw all of the songs that I thought I deleted. It turns out they were just moved to .Trashes/501/. Again manually, I deleted all of the directories under the 501 directory and voila I had all my storage space back.

So long story short, if you run into this again try emptying your .Trashes.

--JJP

Where did you find the .trashes folder exactly?

The .Trashes folder is at the root of both the phone storage and the sd card. It is a hidden directory so if you have the device drives mounted and are looking for it in explorer you will have to enable view hidden files. I use a Mac so I was able to view the drive through the Terminal and use the "ls -al" command to see the full directory list. (This is how I found it to start.)

After some more exploration last night I found the "ES File Explorer" app that lets you see all of the files on the device. Once you install ES, configure it to see hidden files. Open the app, and navigate to settings -> file settings then check "Show Hidden Files." Once you do that you will need to go to / for device storage or /sdcard/ for the sd card storage. You should then be able to see the .Trashes directories on your device and the sd card respectively.

--JJP

Thank you for the explanation, I will try this later tonight.

 

[2010 ZR1]

I can not find these folders, maybe they removed them with the newer phones?

 

[sneaky_zekey]

sneaky_zekey - This thread is about the on board 8 gb showing as full when it isn't and I think your problem is different. I had no trouble installing apps, but I was getting "Phone storage full" messages, was not able to open texts, was getting a LOT of force closes and email was not downloading.

I did check both the on board storage, as well as the my added MicroSD, and the on board had 6.9 gb free and the added MicroSD about 12 gb free. That included all hidden files.

Since this appears to be a different (although similar) problem, I recommend starting a new thread so others will know what you did to find/resolve the problem, as it is unlikely they will get any help from either Verizon or HTC.

i understand this thread was about the internal memory but my issue was very related because i keep getting the error when trying to install i regular app from the market, said device memory was full. i did not find the folder in my device memory,just on my sdcard. i mounted my sd card via usb and on my ubuntu server i opened up my sdcard to view files then enable hiiden files and there it was.

if you cant find the folder on either places,just try to formate your sdcard and see what happens, backup the content on pc first.

 

[atomicrm]

dunno if anyone already mentioned this as i didnt read whole thread. this happened to me before too. plug in your phone and show the hidden files(google how to do this for your os) and then delete everything in the ".trashes" folder on both internal and sd card.

 

[rickvick]

can someone list the step by step process to locate this file (trash)
cause im not.... seeing it, even after hitting the show hidden files dot.

have/had the same issue.... i just went to Application Mag and started clearing out some cache that i didnt use.... BUTTTTTTTT

still having part of the issue... i cant download any..... apps... or update any apps... they just sit at the Update status screen

 

[Rascal]

Same prob here on Incredible. Removing Google Earth removed the "Phone storage Full" note.

 

[rickvick]

got mines to work fine without locating the trashs folder...

i just went into settings, applications, manage apps.... then ones (dont have to delete any) that state "clear data" once u click on it.... i just press it to clear data (on a few of them.... didnt want to clear it on anything serious. stuff like Mail... Google Talk... etc. i just hit the clear data..
now phone works fine again...
able to download from the market again and the Low on Space crap is gone

 

[Rascal]

"Phone storage Full" Part II

Same prob here on Incredible. Removing Google Earth removed the "Phone storage Full" note.

Again got "Full" icon, no abilities to D/L. Finally got a knowledgeable gal at HTC Desk to admit the native Mail app is loading the phone storage to corruption. No fix in sight. Her solution, which has worked:

Plug in external power. A dead batt during restore makes a brick.
Restore to original state: Menu- Settings- Privacy- Factory Data Reset. You lose all your data. Have at hand Wi-Fi security code, Pop3 PW, list of apps you want back, bookmarks, etc. Xfer pix and porn to SD card.
Then,
Go to Market and D/L K-9 Mail. Load your Pop3 to it and use it. Do NOT load mail data to Mail app. Hide that app.
Proceed to load apps, bookmarks, and use Backup Assist to restore People data.

G-F-L.

 

[yojay]

My $.02. Same issue. I removed Google Earth as mentioned. The message went away. I also removed my email account from the native mail reader. I then removed the icon completely. Still using GMAIL.

Tonight the message is back!! I started removing every free/demo app that I don't really need. Available memory seems to hover around 215 MB free but drops as low as 131 MB, according to Advanced Task Cleaner Pro (yes I am using it to see what is running, like a second opinion to Android's built-in app manager). Phone memory according to Android's SD Card and Phone Storage app = 594MB.

My SD card has 960 MB free (FAT) and my phone has 4.2 GB free (FAT 32).

Removing Google Earth did leave a 50MB .dat file on my SD Card in \\Android\data\com.google.earth\cache which I removed.

Basically, I'm not sure this is solved. I think I still have a memory leak somewhere.

 

[Rascal]

Yojay,
Thanks for your input.
I have two weeks now using K-9 Mail, have flogged the phone fiercely with apps and file xfers and D/Ls, charging in car, and USB, pulling phone off laptop connection without 'proper' hardware removal procedure and no 'storage full' icon warnings.
I am with HTC--the default Mail is the prob.
Rascal.

 

[yojay]

Possibly fixed for me at least

FWIW, pulling from another thread out here, I downloaded SMS Backup and copied my SMS/MMS messages to my SD card and then started removing larger message threads (>100). I had >2000 messages on my phone. Since removing about 1000 the message has gone away...for now.

Good stuff out here. Now if I could just keep it charged...

 

[Kylehcc]

I got this issue yesterday and then shortly after I couldn't install new apps...

Oddly enough, I can download apps again after I cleared the Data for Google Talk.

However, I still have the message stating my memory is almost full when it is not.

 

[yojay]

Back to normal for 2 days straight...

So hopefully my last word on this issue. My "phone storage is full" message finally disappeared and has stayed away ever since I uninstalled the native HTC Facebook app update (I doubt I will miss it).

One other thing I noticed as I slowly cleared my phone of apps and messages over the past 2 days: It seems the more space I freed, the more space my contacts app started taking, finally capping around 89MB. Perhaps it's expansion was being fueled by something in the FB update.

I never wiped my phone, so if the native mail app has corrupted my memory to the point that it eventually needs a reset, time will tell.

(of course, as I write this, Pandora throws a JSON error...maybe because I had a song paused for a day and a half).