Does ANYBODY have the answer to this phone storage issue (dear god it's killing me)

[Luisraul924]

when you go to phone storage under settings then click on the bar illustrating the amount of storage you've used up, it shows this screen... https://skydrive.live.com/#cid=A352F411E3A2002B&id=A352F411E3A2002B!537 ... so what in gods name is taking up 3.35 gigs of "other" space? I've scoured every nook and cranny of the internet (figuratively) and I have yet to come up with an answer... Please help.

 

[palandri]

Your link isn't working for me. What phone do you have? Could the space be the operating system?

 

[RZaakir]

Mine shows 1.71 GB of system and 1.48 GB of "other: Not sure if "system" counts the base OS image used to refresh the phone to factory settings or not.

 

[anon(4745364)]

It's mostly like a bunch of data being cached by apps. This happens all the time on my iPhone but the good things is by going to the usage tab I can see what apps are doing it. The usual suspects are Facebook, twitter, reddit.

 

[Sinabu]

From what others have mentioned is, its reserved space set aside by the app itself for when/if it needs more space

 

[Dave Blake]

It is space used by apps for storing things like maps for Nokia Drive and Nokia maps. Anything that apps will use. It might also be reserved space for PC sync but I'm not sure about that. Windows Phone 7 used to keep a reserved space for this but I haven't seen evidence of this in WP8. I did just download a Map for Navigon just to check and my other total went up with the download.

 

[iamtim]

What Dave Blake said. On another thread for this topic, someone posted the answer they got from MS and it was pretty much what Dave just said. It's like browser cache, but for all the apps and the OS... if they need to store some stuff, that's where it's stored.

 

[gapost]

The whole US maps are installed by default. Delete the US maps and just install the states you need.

 

[luk3ja]

Really? Mine shows 4.98Gb of other, how do i get rid of it? :/

 

[iamtim]

My understanding is that when apps don't need it anymore, the OS cleans it up. So maybe... uninstall some apps and restart the phone? *shrug*

 

[smurfercom]

There is something going on with this other storage thing. A lot of people are losing space and cannot load any apps and such and it just keeps growing. I believe it's a storage leak and it's not allocating the space needed properly for certain apps. There should be a way to clean up the cache MS needs to fix this asap! It's killing the storage for other users and mine is growing everyday I'm at 1.14 gigs and still counting...

 

[ivomc]

There is something going on with this other storage thing. A lot of people are losing space and cannot load any apps and such and it just keeps growing. I believe it's a storage leak and it's not allocating the space needed properly for certain apps. There should be a way to clean up the cache MS needs to fix this asap! It's killing the storage for other users and mine is growing everyday I'm at 1.14 gigs and still counting...

This seems like the only truthful explanation, I had as much as 120mb free out of a 4gb mobile which only had 400mb used in applications!! this is ridiculous! the "other" category is occupying around 1gb of space out of 4gb!! I have my music on the sd card...

I've uninstalled 3 or 4 applications, including facebook, and the free memory went up to 350mb from the previous 120mb, thing is... the "other" category only decreased 50mb. I've tested this whole "reserved space" that becomes free when needed and its pure bul****. I have 350mb free and if I try to install something which is over 100mb it says I don't have sufficient space...

 

[SaucePolicy]

It doesn't free up space automatically. Maybe its supposed to but it doesn't work. My free space has gotten down as low as 100MB and other never changes. In fact when I tried to download a game that was 100MB with 300MB free it wouldn't let me and told me I needed to free up space...even though other was taking up nearly 3GB. Microsoft needs to give us a way to empty this if it is indeed a cache. Deleting internet history is the only possible way I've found to slightly reduce it, but you lose your saved passwords and cookies. Please fix Microsoft!

 

[Simpson Bart]

You people have different phones?

Mine came with 1.something Gb in "other" from the box. I just left it there, it now floats around 1.5G. I'm assuming it's caches, temps, and common data.

I also remembered that my "app" data never grew when adding accounts, so I'm guessing things like OS apps store there - don't know about you folks but I have a TON of emails. I assume some of that stuff (mail, contacts, local backup before being uploaded, temporary data, drafts, etc) all end up there. Xbox data, like caches of avatar customization? Unpacked versions of jpegs for use as lock screen? Cached music thumbnails? Cached artist lockscreens?

I only have about 100M of map data, but conversations are fairly large, as I have images in them. Contacts also feature a few hundred images, mail is packed, and so on. No idea if that goes under OS, app or "Other"

 

[anon(5370748)]

Mine's reading 8.80GB in "other". Good thing I have 32GB in my 920

 

[brmiller1976]

Windows Phone shrinks cache to compensate when you run up against your storage limit. In other words, if you have 6 gigs of storage, 5.5 gigs of which is taken up by "other," and want to install a 1 gig app, Windows Phone 8 will shrink the cache by at least half a gig to "make room."

 

[philxor]

The issue is it's not. I tested it on my 8GB 8X which has 2GB of other after about a month of use. I downloaded enough audio to the phone to get it within 100 MB of it's limit. I then attempted to transfer a larger video file and it ran out of space. Other never budged in size.

 

[luk3ja]

Deleting my Internet Explorer history removed 0.25GB but there's still 5GB of other left

 

[happynoodleboy]

Mine is showing 5.6gb being used by other... I deleted browsing history but that had little effect on it.

 

[xcen]

It's an unfixed problem from WP7. It seems that Microsoft wasn't smart enough to include a way for apps to delete its cache automatically after a certain amount of time... which is really annoying.

If you remember back in WP7, there's an app from Jaxbot called 'CacheClearer' App: CacheClearer [Updated: v2] - Windows Phone Hacker
I downloaded it in my previous Omnia 7 and instantly received back more than 1GB worth of space.

I suspect the same thing is happening in WP8, which Microsoft decides to be ignorant of the issue again. With no way to clear cache for apps, the more you use the internet-connected apps, the more cache it will accumulate and so far I don't see any way to delete it. It's an important issue that needs to be solved.