What's the "other" in phone storage?

[chriscookz]

Does anyone know what occupies the "other" space in the phone storage? I've noticed mine keeps growing, and I don't know what the heck is going in there. It was at 2.7GB the other day, now it's up to 3. It isn't movies from my camera roll, I deleted some of those to check if that was it but those are in music+video. I've only got 32GB of space, at some point the mysteriously growing "other" area is going to be a problem if I don't know how to delete the unneeded stuff in there!

Thanks. I'm on a Lumia 920 btw.

 

[wpoblation]

Can you plug the phone in a PC and see which these file(s) are? I thinkt WP8 supports mass storage now.

 

[chriscookz]

Unfortunately I haven't been able to plug the phone in yet, I actually don't have a functioning computer right now. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll be able to get one. This isn't a pressing issue yet, was just curious if anyone else knew what they might be.

 

[angelsimaren]

I am wondering this as well. I plugged in my Lumia 920 and wasn't able to access the "other' folder. This is taking up 5 gb of my phone!

 

[MojoHand69]

I downloaded a game yesterday on my 8X and the Other folder increased by the exact size of the game I downloaded. I am not completely sure what Apps/Games are stored in the Other folder and I find it frustrating that WP8 users cannot access that folder. I hope this changes in an update.

 

[angelsimaren]

Hey guys I found out what the other storage is: it is reserved space for apps and games.

Here's a Microsoft answer page about the issue-

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp8-wpstart/what-is-other-under-storage/979d2948-249b-4303-a475-4183b15af2d6

 

[Sydrian]

I had a 4.5gb video I recorded on the phone that was showing up as "other" after I deleted it the FIRST time. It was originally in my camera roll. After i deleted it the first time, it MOVED to a different folder on the phone. From camera roll, to the videos folder. At this point the space it was taking was being accounted for in the "other" category. So I delete it (on the phone), and it gets MOVED AGAIN. This time it is showing up in videos - pictures - camera roll folder. This time I deleted it via USB in file explorer, and saw my "other" drop from 6.5gb to 2gb. It seems that deleting files via the phone doesn't always work properly.

 

[hopmedic]

My Other is at 6.87GB out of 14.84GB in the phone, it's scary.... I need to know how to find what it is and get rid of it! I've got my pictures and podcasts going onto a 64GB MicroSD card now, but I didn't notice this Other thing until the day I added the SD card.

Looking in the file system, there are three songs that I keep deleting that keep coming back. They are songs that I'd bought through Zune Pass, but I'd thought people were having trouble getting those into their phones??? I can't get rid of mine! LOL There were pics that I'd initially copied to the phone, but when I got the card, I moved them to the card. There are Nokia maps, which I suspect is 2.5GB of that 6.87Gb, but still, there's an awful lot of stuff there and the folders in the phone are showing empty other than the podcast folders which point to the folders on the card where the podcast audio files are. No documents, no videos, no songs other than the three I can't kill off....

 

[hopmedic]

Well, I deleted the USA (2.5GB) and downloaded just Georgia (128MB), and now I'm down from 6.87GB of Other to 4.56GB. I sure would like to know how to get that down, though. Surely I can't have installed that many apps already..... :/

 

[SaucePolicy]

My "other" is taking up 2.39GB and I have no idea what it is. The largest game/app I've downloaded is NFS:Hot Pursuit demo. After deleting it and rebooting the phone, the "other" size barely changed. It's very annoying especially considering the limit of 16GB on my 8x.

 

[rockstarzzz]

Just curious, why does it matter?

Surely that folder has something that is needed and shouldn't be manually deleted.

Let's called "Other" - "Stuff you shouldn't delete"

 

[hopmedic]

You can't delete it, or even view it, anyway. The reason I'm concerned is that my phone was so full so fast.

 

[pvcleave]

Part of Other is data that applications use. Some of the data is going to be your browser history. I deleted mine and went from 5.19 GB to 4.84 GB

It is also email, the more email the more data. Also applications that download data and store on the phone will also inflate this number.

 

[Grey NK 822]

I had a 4.5gb video I recorded on the phone that was showing up as "other" after I deleted it the FIRST time. It was originally in my camera roll. After i deleted it the first time, it MOVED to a different folder on the phone. From camera roll, to the videos folder. At this point the space it was taking was being accounted for in the "other" category. So I delete it (on the phone), and it gets MOVED AGAIN. This time it is showing up in videos - pictures - camera roll folder. This time I deleted it via USB in file explorer, and saw my "other" drop from 6.5gb to 2gb. It seems that deleting files via the phone doesn't always work properly.

This phone has some serious bugs.... mine duplicates movies, photos & music like crazy. If you delete one copy none of the others will play! The video playback quality is horrible, choppy & skips most of what was recorded. Doesn't matter if it was saved to the 10 speed 64 gb card or phone!

 

[mikemacias]

I think my problem is by far the worst!

Check this out:



I manually removed every third party app. I manually removed every email account, facebook, and twitter. Nokia Maps, Drive, etc is removed. Everything I can possibly remove - is deleted. A few photos are left and that's about it. Why can't I get rid of whatever is eating my "Other" category?

I'm about to do a hard reset but I first want to get down to the problem so I can avoid this in the future.

 

[Alex Rodriguez Jr.]

Even with Zune, you could set the other percentage to 0% & somehow it would still eat up 5%+

 

[dalydose]

This has annoyed me since WP7. I would never just assume that it's "stuff I shouldn't delete" and I would really like to know what is taking so much of my valuable space and what one can do to reduce it.

 

[hopmedic]

So this is irritating and senseless.... I deleted the Nokia Maps offline maps of the entire US and just downloaded my state. That got me back more than 2 GB of the "Other" space. So last night, I'm thinking maybe if I delete the offline videos stored by SuperTube, that might help. But Nooooooooooo! Of course not. That would have made sense, right? That space savings came from the program space (or whatever it's caled - I can't think of it off hand), not the Other. *head*desk*head*desk*

 

[Jayme Cousins]

Received an OTA update today on my Lumia 920. Small one. Noticed that the Other footprint dropped from 6.2Gb yesterday to 3.2Gb following the udpate. Might have been conincidence but it's a happy one if so.

 

[gpobernardo]

I experimented a bit on this:

I have noticed that enabling the auto-upload back-up feature for the photos eats up a lot of space in the others storage section.

After first enabling it and after it has finished uploading the photos to Skydrive, the others storage grew dramatically. With the hopes of restoring my free space, I disabled it and deleted the uploaded photos from Skydrive, but sadly the free space was not recovered. So I had to uninstall some games and apps.

After a few days, I thought of re-enabling the auto-upload back-up feature since the space has already been eaten for it anyway. To my horror, even if the photos that were re-uploaded were the same ones as before, the other storage still grew. Again, disabling it and deleting the photos from Skydrive didn't help. I had to reset my phone. LUCKILY, windows phone 8 has the back-up feature for phone settings and SMS so restoring it back wasn't really a problem. Now I make sure that I would not enable the auto-back-up feature for the photos to Skydrive, and I am now enjoying twice as much free space as before.

Try not enabling the auto-back-up feature for the photos until Microsoft finds and update for this, and let me know your observations.