Out of space after Lollipop update on my S5

[Zone99]

I got the Lollipop update for my S5 and I'm having more problems with space on my phone than ever.  Ever since I got the thing, I've been running the hairy edge of out of space on the internal storage and I added an SD card to help with it.

I've moved all my photos, videos and my apps to the SD card that I can (emphasize that) but I'm still completely out of space. 

Storage usage seems to show:

• 9 GB of apps installed
• 5.48GB of Miscellaneous files

The stupid part of the above is that some of the apps are the bloatware installed by Samsung/Verizon and there seems to be more of them now.  Kindle, Pandora, Amazon apps - I can uninstall updates for them but I can't uninstall the apps themselves and I can't move them to the SD card.

Miscellaneous files is a lot of fun because looking at that category, all I see are a bunch of things that are a few kilobytes or bytes in size.  Nothing even close to 5 1/2 gigs of space.

I think the update duplicated the system files and I can't prove it. 

Any ideas here?  I've already wiped the system cache. 

Thanks.

[vzw_customer_support]

Zone99,

That is certainly a very strange issue to have after this update! You've already done a great job of managing your memory - now we have to find out what is causing this internal storage space issue. Are you getting any error messages that alert you to low memory?

SarahO_VZW
Follow us on Twitter @VZWSupport

[Zone99]

Sarah,

Thanks for the quick reply.  I installed an app called 'DiskUsage' and was able to drill down on the problem.

Prior to the update, I had moved a number of apps to the SD storage card.  One of those was Smugmug, an app to interface with the Smugmug photo site.  I had a number of my galleries downloaded and using 4.5GB of space.

Moving that over and going to Settings->Applications showed that the 4.5 GB of space was on the SD card.

Using Astro File Manager and going to the Smugmug directory and media directories on the INTERNAL storage showed as empty.

'DiskUsage', however, showed that the 4.5GB was still on internal storage. 

I cleared the data for the app and 4.5GB are back. Looks like a bug in Android in general where, even after the move of an app and it's data, it'll show as being on the external storage but may still be on the internal storage.

Now if I could just get rid of all the apps I don't want.

Thanks.

[dilbertaz]

I ran into that with Smugmug once upon a time too, I turned off the automatic download of my galleries and now it just loads the ones I browse to instead of trying to cache my whole smugmug site.  I think it is a poor app default to enable that option for everyone besides the data usage it can potentially use a lot of storage.

[GalaxyClass]

It is a very poor default and can/has caught many.

[dilbertaz · Accepted solution]

Try installing and running Storage Analyser - Android Apps on Google Play

and see where your space is being used up, once we figure that out we can figure out what to do about it.