If you aren’t using a device running stock Android, you must have noticed various bloated apps taking up precious internal storage. Uninstalling bloatware is one of the best things you can do to free internal storage space. However, you can only uninstall system apps on a rooted Android device. The final approach for this tutorial would be to change the storage option of your camera, now this does not directly free up your storage space like the other six approaches but it directs any future photos and videos you record with your phone to your SD card thereby removing the storage burden from your internal storage. How to free up space on your Android phone or tablet. No more room at the inn, and no expansion slot for adding more? Here are some strategies for reclaiming precious Android storage.

Running out of storage space on your Android mobile phone? Here’s how to delete unnecessary junk and free up plenty of space for your apps and media, in just a few easy steps.

If your Android smartphone’s storage is filling up fast, don’t panic. There are loads of quick and easy ways to get rid of unnecessary junk and free up loads of storage space on your mobile, without resorting to deleting photos and apps that you might eventually need.

Here’s our quick and easy guide to freeing up your mobile’s memory.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Check how much storage remains

To find out how much storage you actually have left on your Android mobile, head to your phone’s settings and then scroll down to ‘Storage’.

In here you’ll see an exact breakdown of how much space you’re using and what is taking up that space. This is broken down into apps, photos and videos, audio (music, podcasts and so on), downloads and cached data. If you spot that one particular section is hogging loads of space, then it’s time to do something about it.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Delete any apps you no longer use

Apps are usually the biggest drain on your storage space, so head to your Android phone’s settings and then scroll down to ‘Apps’ and give it a tap.

In here you’ll see a list of all of your downloaded apps, with an indication of how much space each one is taking up. The bigger that number, the more storage you’ll get back if you delete it; so it’s time to work out if you really need that ‘Hilarious Farty App’ or if it can go straight into the bin.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Backup your photos to the cloud

The essential Google Photos app allows you to store your snaps and home-made videos in the cloud for free, and it comes as standard on most Android phones now – but if you don’t have it (only likely if your phone is already over a year old), then head to the Google Play store and get it downloaded.

With that done, tap the menu icon in the top left of the Photos app (which looks like three horizontal lines) and choose ‘Settings’. Finally, tap ‘Backup & sync’ and make sure that this is turned on. Any photos that you snap on your phone will automatically be saved to Google’s cloud service, so you can safely delete them from your mobile to free up space.

Read next: Ten quick ways to get better mobile battery life

Of course, we highly recommend checking your Google Photos account from another device first, just to make sure that they’re 100 percent backed up. After all, you don’t want to accidentally lose that photo of your mate Brian lying face-down in a puddle of his own stomach contents after too many Drambuies.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Ditch the downloads

These days it’s actually reasonably affordable to grab an All You Can Eat (AYCE) data contract, which allows you to download media to your heart’s content at no extra cost – provided you don’t roam abroad, of course.

That means you can happily delete all of the music and videos from your Android Phone and just stream your entertainment instead. Services such as Spotify, BBC’s iPlayer Radio and Netflix offer a massive catalogue of online content, which you can stream as much as you like for a small monthly charge. Just remember that you won’t be able to take advantage when travelling abroad, unless you’re covered by something like Three’s Feel At Home service.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Messaging hogs

If you use third-party messaging apps on your Android mobile, these could also be eating up your valuable storage space.

For instance, WhatsApp users should try going into one of their popular conversations and tapping the Media/Group Media option in the settings. This will bring up all of the photos that have been sent back and forth in the conversation, which can be deleted en masse to free up more space. Thankfully these pics do get automatically deleted as time passes, so you should only bother with this step if your mates send a lot of photos.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Clear your Android phone’s cache

After using a phone for a few months, chances are you’ll have at least a gig of cached data cluttering up your Android handset’s storage space. This is just garbage saved to your phone by apps and your web browser, to speed up operation, and can be safely blitzed to free up storage space.

In the Android settings menu, head to Storage and then tap the ‘Cached data’ entry. This will prompt you to delete all of the cached data. Tap ‘OK’ and it will all be erased – for now. Check back again soon and it’ll be back, ready to be re-deleted.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Clear old downloads

If you save a lot of documents, photos and so on to your phone, they’ll appear in the Downloads section of the Storage menu – or in the Downloads app. Give this a tap and you’ll see everything you’ve downloaded and how much space it all takes up. You can delete them directly from here.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Add extra storage with a microSD memory card

Many Android phones allow you to add extra storage, in the form of a microSD memory card. The microSD memory card slot is usually found in the same tray where your SIM card sits.

These memory cards are affordable and a great way to get a huge chunk of bonus storage, for your photos, videos and other bits. Check out Amazon for a huge selection of cards.

Phones from 2016 that don’t support microSD memory cards include the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, and the OnePlus 3 and 3T. In these cases, you’ll need to check out the next section instead.

How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Add extra storage via third-party accessories

If you’ve harvested all of the spare storage space that you can, but your Android phone is still pretty full, you could consider adding extra storage using accessories such as a special phone case with a built-in memory card slot. Alternatively, you can stream your media from home with a NAS device.

Check out our guides to adding extra storage to your phone:

By Gina Barrow, Last updated: November 20, 2020

How To Free Up Internal Storage Space On Android Phones

“How do I free up some space without formatting my device now that it says Internal Storage on Android is full?”

Most Android devices come in with internal storage ranging from 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB. Although these storage sizes look big, Android Smartphones easily gets full. We often pile up our devices with lots of apps, games, photos, and more than eat up the storage.

When your phone is full, you will notice that it begins to slow down in performance and often freeze up upon opening apps and worse, apps crash. In order to make the most of your device, you tend to delete some files that usually come in big sizes without even backing it up.

The lesser space we have left on the device, the more we look for ways on how to free up without being guilty of erasing few memories, cool games, and fun apps. Today, we will go over 3 effective methods on how to free internal storage on Android when it gets full.

Part 1. Free up Space on Android Using Android Data Backup and Restore

We cannot exactly determine which phone contents take up a lot of space because it depends on each user. However, the majority of space-huggers are actual photos, videos, and other media contents. Next, would be the apps, depending on how much data was saved in it.

It would basically take more time, manually copying and transferring these media contents especially when you lack time and your phone is already acting up.

The easiest and fastest method you can use is FoneDog Android Data Backup and Restore. You can practically use this whenever you have the internal storage of your android full. This third party software lets you create a backup of the entire device so you can clear them off your phone.

It primarily backs up contents like your contacts, call history, messages, app messages, photos, videos, and many more. Once you have set up the backup, you can easily restore them at any time you need it back.

How to Backup Android Data

Here is How FoneDog Android Data Backup and Restore Works:

1. Open the software on your computer and plug in your Android phone
2. Go to Android Data Backup and Restore Tool
3. Choose from Device Data backup or One-Click Backup. If you want to use selective backup then you can choose the former option, but if you want to back up the entire device, you can choose the latter.
4. If you selected the Device Data Backup, you will be asked to select the types of files you want and click next to continue.
5. Wait until the software completes the backup process

How to Restore Android Data

To restore your Android backup:

1. Connect the Android phone to the computer and launch FoneDog Android Data Backup and Restore
2. Choose the Restore mode and select from the backup lists
3. Optionally, you can selectively choose which files to restore
4. Don’t forget to authorize the restoration process and wait until it’s finished

Highlights of FoneDog Android Data Backup and Restore:

• 100% safe to use, with proven no data loss
• User-friendly interface
• Supports all types of Android Smartphones
• Allows file preview
• Selective file backup and restore option

You don’t have to worry anymore where and how to manage your device when android internal storage gets a full message appears again.

Part 2. Transfer Files to SD Card to Avoid Internal Storage Full Message on Android

Perhaps the quickest solution you will think about when you know that your Android internal storage is already full is to transfer some of your apps and files to the SD card.

Android SD cards also come in varying storage capacities ranging from 2GB up to 512GB. The price also varies depending on the storage capacity you want and the brand. You can move the photos to your SD card as well as some of your apps so your Android phone performance won’t be affected.

To move some of your apps to the SD card, follow these:

1. On your android phone, navigate to Settings and then go to Internal Storage
2. Locate Apps and begin with the heaviest app on your device
3. Tap Change and then tap SD card in the storage location window
4. Lastly, tap Move to confirm the changes
5. Do this to all apps you wish to move to the SD card

Internal Space Android

You can also make the SD card the default storage location of your android phone, here’s how:

1. From the phone’s Settings go to Storage
2. Under the default storage location, choose SD Card

That’s it! All the files such as photos will be saved on the SD card by default so you don’t have to worry about slowing down your phone’s performance.

Part 3. 4 Other Methods on How to Clear Space on Android’s Internal Storage

Now that we have learned 2 main methods on how to free up some space, we have also listed some of the effective measures you can do to get rid of the storage full message.

1. For Android 8.0 Oreo Storage Menu

If your android phone is running on 8.0 Oreo, there is a great feature that was added which is the Storage menu where you can see the complete breakdown of apps installed on your phone.

It’s basically more advanced than the usual Storage menu in the settings. You can select and view which phone files actually take up a lot of space including any associated apps.

Clearing the apps is easy in this menu, you don’t have to dig deep in every app saved and delete them. Follow this guide on how to clear some space:

1. Open the Storage Menu from your android phone
2. Under the total space of your device, tap Free Up Space
3. Scroll down and select the items you wish to remove

That is all you need to do! However, this method is only optional to those users with updated android version to 8.0 Oreo.

2. To Delete Old and Useless Apps

Well, many of us are actually guilty of downloading apps but never had the chance of using it. Often, we already forgot that these apps are installed on our phones until we experience some low memory issues.

What you can do is assess and check the apps installed on your phone. Categorize them based on the importance and usage frequency. Once you have determined that you no longer need these apps, uninstall them so you can gain some space.

1. In Settings, go to your Apps and tap Manage Apps
2. Find those less used apps and tap Uninstall
3. Do this to other apps you want to remove

3. To Clear App Data

If for some reasons, you cannot just let go of your apps, you can also try to clear the data to retrieve some space. However, this is only a temporary solution and you might need to do this often every time you get the storage space full.

1. On the same settings, open the desired app
2. Tap Clear Data
3. Wait until the system clears all data related to this app
4. Repeat this process to all apps you wish to clear

Clearing data will not erase files off your android but rather, removes the saved information from that given app, including accounts and customized settings. So if you cleared the data off your Facebook app, you need to simply re-login start using the app again.

4. To Copy Photos to the Computer

Another option to get rid of the internal storage full on android is to transfer your photos and videos to the computer. Media files as we all now take a lot of space and often the reason why we get the storage limit issue.

If you are not yet familiar with this process, follow this guide on a Windows PC:

1. Plugin your android phone to the computer via USB cable
2. Go to This PC and double click on your Smartphone
3. Open the DCIM folder and highlight all the photos and videos you wish to move. Use the CTRL+C on your keyboard to copy the files.
4. Create a new folder in the file explorer as your file destination, use the CTRL+V to paste all the media contents you just moved

You can connect your Android phone to the computer again, in case you need to move the files back to your phone.

Part 4. Summary

In this article, we have learned the different ways on what you can do when you get the internal storagefull on your android phone. There are many ways to free up space and each option has its advantages and disadvantages.

Among these methods, the most efficient is by using FoneDog Android Data Backup and Restore program. It simply lets you manage all your files conveniently in one place so you can restore them faster and efficiently from the same source.

The rest of the methods we shared were all manual processes and basically needs your time and extra effort to redeem your storage back. However, the decision is up to your needs; if you need a fast and efficient way to free up space then use the first option. If you have time to spare then you can choose from the rest of the options we shared.