Data Backup Digest

If you use your phone every day, chances are it’s getting a bit clogged up with unnecessary data. Whether it’s applications you no longer use, photos from years ago, or just internet downloads, we’re going to show you how to clear up wasted storage space on your Samsung phone.

Samsung now has a built-in feature to their phones which allows you to automatically clear up storage space. To access this, go to Settings > Device Management. This will give you an overview of your phone’s performance out of 100, breaking it down into sections like battery, memory and storage. It’s worth noting that you shouldn’t take the figure listed here too seriously.

Tap ‘Storage’ to get into the section we’re interested in. This will then show you how much system/user data is stored on your phone, the available space, and what it considers to be unnecessary data. Beneath this you’ll see this broken down into documents, images, audio, videos and applications, along with how much space you have on your SD card (if you have one).

If you want to let the system handle everything, tap ‘Clean now’ and it’ll run a system clean to automatically remove what it considers to be unnecessary. However, this isn’t recommended, since it’s always better to have your own control over what is being removed.

As such, tap each category in turn to see what data is taking up that storage space. You can then tap each item that you want to remove. This is really helpful, especially for things like images and videos that can easily get clogged up.

The applications section has some use because it’ll break your apps down by how often you use them. However, selecting them from this list will remove the application entirely, just not the data associated with it. As such, only use this section if you definitely don’t want it on your phone anymore.

There are other ways to get more storage space. The best way, if your phone supports it, is to get a microSD card. These are available in high capacities for a small cost. Pop it in your phone and Android should automatically guide you through the setup process. You can then use the File Manager application on your phone to move across your personal media, like photos and videos. You can also use the microSD card as the default storage device, meaning you won’t need to keep moving things across. Some applications won’t be able to use the microSD because they need access to internal system files.

Another method to clean up your storage is to make use of your Samsung account or Google Drive. These cloud storage services will back up your personal media to the cloud – not only do they free up storage, but they also ensure that your data is kept safe if you lose your phone or if you want to transfer between devices. Just remember that storing in the cloud has different security considerations than if you were to just store it locally.