A few years ago, I wrote about what’s on my phone. Today, after a single chat with R.L. Dane talking about how he doesn’t want his Signal backups to be more than 1.5 GB, I checked the size of my Signal storage use, and realized it’s more than 2.5 GB. From there, I decided to take a look at how much space is taken over in my phone, and by what apps or files… and what does that say about me as a person?
To get the specific storage usage by folder, I used Solid Explorer, which has a pretty simple setting to view it at a glance. The rest I got from Android’s app settings section.
For obvious privacy reasons—and lazyness to be honest—I won’t be too specific about everything, but I’ll share what isn’t that big of a deal.
My current phone has 128 GB of built-in memory, I remember back then how I was happy with my Redmi 5A’s 32 GB, and 16 GB MicroSD card sometimes. Oh how the times have changed…
Anyway, the Internal storage I have access to, consists of 105 GB, and I have 7.37 GB left for now.
Folders by size
- Manga - 13.6 GB: I read a lof of manga on my phone, so I download it in advance, I’ve done a pretty bad job at managing it. There are many chapters I’ve already finished but didn’t delete. There’s an auto-delete feature in the app I use, but I didn’t enable it until a month or so ago. I have the first 20 or so chapters ready to go of many series I haven’t started yet. I still have all of Death Note and Monster downloaded, they are masterpieces, but maybe I should not fill up my phone with them.
- Signal Backups - 7.86 GB: Being in two fairly active Signal groups, and having two backups stored makes it so all of this space is used on that. I truly enjoy looking back on these chats from time to time, as well as personal ones, I should probably delete the old media taking up space when it isn’t necessary anymore though.
- Music - 7.43 GB: This is all the local music I have on my phone, I also have some downloaded inside apps, which will be shown later, Queen and Daft Punk are take like 1.3 GB each, then Mariya Takeuchi and Miki Matsubara with 500 MB each, all of them are
.flac, the rest of artists are MP3 or have less songs. - DCIM - 5.86 GB: Everyone knows this folder, it’s just photos and videos taken on my phone and not much else. The largest file here is a timelapse of a badminon match with my sister, the second is a video of the last round of a match of Spoons with friends.
- Pictures - 3.36 GB: These are mostly edited photos with Snapseed (like 500 MB) and Screenshots (like 1.5 GB), I really should clean these up…
- Android - 2.15 GB: Just media from WhatsApp chats, not super interesting stuff.
- Download 1.8 GB: I have a little too many PSP games downloaded here for no reason, I should just transfer them to my PSP already. I also had some zipped Music which I had already transferred to the Music folder.
- Backups - 1.33 GB: This is a synced folder (using Syncthing), with my Threema backups, backup files from different apps, contacts and pictures, as well as my keepass database. Mostly random stuff.
- Anime - 1.27 GB: I have some episodes of Gurren Lagann, Dr Stone and Ace of Diamond I should have already watched. Will clean up after I’m done writing this.
- Videos - 1.17 GB: Here is where my downloads from Tubular (a Newpipe fork) go, or random videos and screen recordings.
- Syncthing - 2.02 GB: Files I keep in sync with my laptop and family, mostly church presentations, books, song chords, and pdf files.
- Books - 136 MB Back when I read books on my phone, I still have them just in case.
- Documents - 67 MB Here are my markdown files edited with Markor, and some other random documents, I should probably move this stuff to my synced folder one of these days…
Apps by size
I have plenty of folders, but I still think most of my storage is being used by apps with a lot of internal data on them, so here are the top 10 just for fun. I’ll leave the few games I got for later, and I’ll skip system apps.
- AntennaPod - 5.29 GB, yeah… a lot of downloaded episodes I haven’t gone through, plus auto-downloads every week!
- WhatsApp - 3.27 GB, welp.
- Signal - 2.93 GB, even though I only have like 10 active chats and groups, I got quite a lot of data on it!
- RiMusic - 2.03 GB, a YT Music alternative frontend with some downloaded music on it.
- Threema Libre - 1.7 GB, I think I am in too many public groups I don’t even use much compared to Signal, time for some cleaning up here.
- Fennec - 1.05 GB, my web browser of choice, pretty good, I think some of this would clean up just by deleting Downloads.
- Nintendo Music - 578 MB, what can I say, they have a great collection of sountracks from my childhood.
- Telegram - 425 MB, I guess keeping most of my chats in their cloud helps.
- Bank - 300 MB, hm.
- Element - 284 MB, I am actually surprised, although I barely use Matrix anymore, maybe talk to me there! or XMPP, Conversations is only like 70 MB.
Games by size
Most other games are well below 200 MB and I’d rather save them for a blog post focused on that later, if I feel like it. Right now all of them are in danger of deletion anyway since I barely play them.
- Brawl Stars - 1.67 GB, a game I haven’t opened much in a while, but I still don’t want to delete it.
- Dicey Dungeons - 1.16 GB, a fully offline and complete game, a deck-builder roguelike which is lots of fun!
- Marvel Snap - 0.98 GB, a deck-building and card collecting game with a lot of things to unlock and great mechanics.
Finishing thoughts
When I was a youngling I remember being like “why do you need so much space in your phone?”, and well, look at me now, I am holding up just because I am not that big of a photo taker or a music listener. There’s people out there who need 256 GB on their phones, that’s crazy to me, but then again, needing more than 32 GB was crazy for me 7 years ago.
Still, I think I can clean this up pretty easily, maybe compressing some pictures or transferring them to some external storage medium.
I really should look into some backup solutions off-site and such, both for this and my laptop, could be fun to setup at some point.
This is day 53 of #100DaysToOffload
