How to free storage without deleting anything

When our smartphones don’t work correctly, our mobile and digital dependent brains get quite the shock – when we need to use our smartphones, which is rather often, we want it to work perfectly. And that makes speed and response the ultimate defining factors when it comes to our smartphone’s capabilities. Clearing out the memory from our phones is a quick solution; and we often turn to our photography collection or ‘unused’ apps.

While deleting useless apps and blurry photos is always a good idea; removing valuable apps and content from our devices is a shame. Luckily, there are a number of ways to free up space on your phone without deleting apps.

If you’re sporting an Android smartphone; here are 3 tips to clear space without deleting apps:

System apps disabled

You know all those in-built apps on your Android device, the ones you found installed on your new phone but could never delete? Well, the bottom line is that you can not delete them (unless you get your phone Rooted); but you can easily disable all the apps in your settings section.

This will reduce some data that might be taking up space. Here’s how:

1. long press the icon you want to disable,
2. drag it to the top of your screen, to ‘info’ at the top right corner of your screen,
3. your Settings page will appear for the particular app,
4. here you can disable the app by choosing the option.

WhatsApp media removed

Recent updates on WhatsApp now allow users to manage storage space. This allows you to sift through your individual messaging or group chats and see which ones are taking up the most space. Controlling or limiting the amount of storage your conversations take up is all in your control.

You can even choose what kind of data you want to store; for example videos, photos or GIFs.

Google Photos activated

Google Photos is a great solution to store all your photos safely and securely. This Google creation, like other Google developments allows you to organise your content to your liking – it also allows you to free up space on your Android device.

Enabling ‘backup & sync’ is a great idea to activate on your phone; this means that every photo is backed up online. You will also be able to choose the source from which your photos are taken; such as Instagram or WhatsApp. Best part… unlimited storage.

Once you’re done; click ‘free up space’ and Google will automatically free up space on your phone by removing all backed up photos and videos.

If you’re an iPhone user; here are 3 tricks to and free up storage:

Photos managed

iPhone’s iOS gives you many options to reduce storage internally; you can start off by disabling your Photo Stream. This is done to sync photos across Mac, iPhone and iPad; if you don’t need this feature; simply disable following this path: Go to Settings > iCloud > Photos > Uncheck “Upload to My Photo Stream”.

You can even turn off Sharing Photos in iCloud; by following the same path and disabling “iCloud Photo Sharing”. The last way to reduce storage issues with photo management, is to disable the Saving Duplicate Photos feature when shooting in HDR.

Every time you take a shot in HDR, your iPhone saves two shots; an original photo and the processed one. Follow this path to disable duplicate photos in HDR: Go to Settings > Photos & Camera > Enable “Keep Normal Photo”.

iMessage files deleted

Every file you send across iMessage is saved as a duplicate in iMessage ‘Documents and Data”. This takes up precious memory on your phone. Whether it’s a small image or a large video; every MB counts when you’re trying to keep your iPhone in top condition.

In order to increase data storage capacity:

1. open iMessage and find the conversation with the files you wish to remove,
2. tap and hold on the file you want to delete and click ‘More’ on the pop-up
3. select all the media files you wish to remove and press the Trash icon.

Safari cleared

Our browsing habits save Temporary Files which clog up your storage through the Safari history storage; clearing cache and history will tidy up your iPhone and result in more storage space.

Clear your history by heading to Settings, entering Safari and clicking “Clear History and Website Data”. Easy and effective.

A smartphone with more storage is a much more effective tool for our everyday life. Find the best solution for your smartphone needs and increase storage without ever having to delete an app again!

Though 32GB may be quite enough for a lot of people, it can still be filled up pretty quickly, considering there are so many amazing apps that make our life easy and constant media sharing on messaging apps like WhatsApp.

How To make space on your Android phone Without deleting the important apps

The best thing you can do is use the built-in storage tool that is provided on every Android OS, the storage tool lets you see which files are taking up space so that you can clear them off from your mobile phone.

But, sometimes using the built-in tool is not quite sufficient, there are several third-party apps available in this Play Store that are specifically designed for managing storage on your smartphone.

The one app that I have been using for a long time, is the ES Explorer, which is actually a file management system that lets you access files on your Android phone just like a PC User Interface. and it also has an inbuilt feature, for clearing out temporary files from your Android device.

You can also use Files Go by Google which is a newly launched cleaner app from Google itself, the app is specially created for Smartphones with Limited storage and the beauty of app is that it gives you recommendations on which are the apps that you can uninstall from your phone and what files can be deleted to make space on your smartphone

Usually, the apps that I mentioned above we clear the cache on your Android device. But, you can still check it out manually, apps such as YouTube, Google Play Music Facebook store a lot of data on your phone.

Suppose, if you are saving a music file on Google Play music or you have saved a bunch of videos on YouTube app,  You can remove the data by going to the storage option particular app (in the app section from settings area)

Disable the System apps

Android devices come with bundled apps most of which we don’t really at all since these are systems as they cannot be deleted or uninstalled from Android unless your phone is Rooted.

You can still disable these apps and it will save some of the data that might be taking when it is enabled.

To disable the app,  

• Long press on the icon,  
• and drag it on the top at the right side where it says ‘info’,  
• this will open the settings page for the particular app where you can disable the app (sometimes you may need to uninstall the update before the disable button can appear)

Remove media files from WhatsApp

In one of its recent updates, WhatsApp has introduced an option where it lets you manage storage space by allowing you to see how much data WhatsApp media files are occupying, and you can delete them specifically from particular Groups for individual chats.

You also get the option to delete only a particular file type, mostly the videos are the one that occupies the largest space so you can use remove just the video and keep text images and GIFs

Use Google Photos and free up space on your phone

Google photos is kind of Magical and apart from giving you the ability to Organise your photos, it also lets you free up space on your phone.

You can enable ‘backup & sync’, so that every photo you take from your phone is backed up online.

Google photos also gives you the option to select other folders on your Android device from where the photos and videos can be  backed up.

Once you have backed up the desired photos and videos,  you will have to simply click on ‘free up space’ and Google will automatically remove the photos  from the device it has backed up. this simple trick can free up GBs of storage space.

Also, note that Google photos provide unlimited Storage for photos and videos it’s quite awesome

Move apps to the MicroSD card

And this option would only work if your smartphone has a MicroSD card slot, you can simply move the apps to MicroSD card.

Not all the apps can be moved to MicroSD card, but you can check what apps allow you to do so by going to the settings of the particular app, which you can do by long pressing and dragging the app to the info option on the top right side.

So these are the things that you can do to make some space on your Android device without having to delete or uninstall important apps.

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