Need help: System & reserved is 25.4GB in phone storage. Is there a fix for this?

[kiteless]

Need help: "System & reserved" is 25.4GB in phone storage

Edit: (THIS IS RESOLVED, SEE BELOW)

Hey all so I have been searching around and not seeing anyone else with this problem. Really enjoying my Lumia 950 XL but I can no longer update it because the phone storage is effectively full. "System & reserved" is claiming 25.4GB of space. I have the phone setup to install apps on the phones internal storage and everything else goes to the 64GB SD card. I have not been able to find a way to clean up this huge amount of space being taken up by this. I would REALLY prefer not to wipe and reset my phone. Anyone else seeing this and/or know a fix for it? Thanks.

 

[jamrock60]

This is a new one. You might have to do a reset. Seems like there are allot of dump files.

 

[kiteless]

Re: Need help: "System & reserved" is 25.4GB in phone storage

Thanks for the info. I might have to do that. I mainly don't want to reset because I have a game save I don't wanna loose.

Wish there was a way to clean this up without wiping the phone.

 

[atrsh]

Re: Need help: "System & reserved" is 25.4GB in phone storage

Thanks for the info. I might have to do that. I mainly don't want to reset because I have a game save I don't wanna loose.

Wish there was a way to clean this up without wiping the phone.

Can you just move the game apps to the SD card and then do the reset?

 

[ronaldme]

Re: Need help: "System & reserved" is 25.4GB in phone storage

Thanks for the info. I might have to do that. I mainly don't want to reset because I have a game save I don't wanna loose.

Wish there was a way to clean this up without wiping the phone.

Sadly there isn't a way to do a hard reset without losing apps, even moving apps/games to sd card ms won't work.

Do a hard reset with buttons.

 

[anthonyng]

Re: Need help: "System & reserved" is 25.4GB in phone storage

Wow what's in there? Mine says 3.99 is for system files for windows and another 256meg for virtual memory totalling 4.24gb

 

[kiteless]

Re: Need help: System & reserved is 25.4GB in phone storage. Is there a fix for this?

SOLVED: Hey all so I figured it out. I finally started really tinkering around. In the summary it said thatI had like 2.4GB of apps installed in phone storage so I kept ignoring that section, but when I went in there I noticed that Spotify was using almost 17GB of space, and this YouTube downloader app was using like 4GB of space. For some reason these didn't count against installed app space usage. So I told the phone to move the app to the fast 64GB SD card. Spotify took a little while, but the space taken up didn't change. I then moved the YouTube downloader app to the SD card as well. I guess after that finished the storage meters caught up. I suddenly had around 19GB of free space on the phones built in storage! Yay. After that I was able to install the latest updates.

This leaves me wondering why it would label the downloaded content of these two apps, and likely others, as System and Reserved space. I don't recall Windows Phone ever behaving this way in the past.

Well hopefully this will help out other people. Thanks for all the feedback folks!

// Jason

 

[snakebitten]

Re: Need help: System & reserved is 25.4GB in phone storage. Is there a fix for this?

I mostly appreciate both the effort you made to find a solution, AND the integrity to post the facts here without just throwing a Microsoft Sucks temper tantrum.

Refreshing. And informative. Good job man.

 

[ronaldme]

Re: Need help: System & reserved is 25.4GB in phone storage. Is there a fix for this?

This leaves me wondering why it would label the downloaded content of these two apps, and likely others, as System and Reserved space.

Because it is information stored in the isolated storage.

 

[kiteless]

Re: Need help: System & reserved is 25.4GB in phone storage. Is there a fix for this?

I mostly appreciate both the effort you made to find a solution, AND the integrity to post the facts here without just throwing a Microsoft Sucks temper tantrum.

Refreshing. And informative. Good job man.

Hey thanks for the Kudo's! I see too many posts that are exactly as you describe, or almost worse, they say. "Oh never mind I figured it out." And it's like... WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?!?!!!!!111!!!111oneoneone So I thought a conclusion would be helpful. haha.

Despite having a few flaws, as all phones do, I have had a great experience with my 950XL. It's by far the nicest phone I have ever owned, and the lagest.

Because it is information stored in the isolated storage.

That's exactly what seems to be the most obvious answer. By why isolate it? When it's on the SD card, it shows up as regular storage and not "System and Reserved" on that location (SD).

Windows, Mac, Linux, IOS, Android, I dabble with all of them, some of them professionally. They all do things that don't seem to make sense. Some worse than others. If this is done this way by design I think it's a bad choice. But it;s manageable if one knows where to look and what to do.

Personally I think Microsoft is doing a good job trying to make Windows 10 Phone, as easy to use as possible without going "one button" iPhone simple.

Anyway thanks for the replies folks.

// Jason

 

[Pip]

I would like to chime in with my own solution: I plugged the SD card into my PC and resolved the errors. This turned the "system and reserved" files into "other" files. Then I went by them one by one and found among other things 25GB worth of cache from the Youtube App, mostly empty folders.