Question Galaxy Tab a6 storage use doesn't add up

[James Blonde]

My wife has a Galaxy Tab A6 running android 8.1. It has 16gb of internal storage (and has also got a 128gb SD card installed)

She's running out of space on the internal storage. Under Device Maintenance > Storage, it shows she was using 15.6gb out of the 16gb installed. However the user data added up to maybe 5gb. So I'm left wondering what's using the rest...

I've installed a 3rd party file manager and run the storage analyser. The folder apparently using the most space is the Android folder, at 603mb. Apps run to 788mb. There is nothing significant in the cache for any of these apps. Not one folder - including hidden ones - explains a missing 10gb of space.

She'd stopped using a game (hidden city) which appeared to be taking up a huge amount of storage in video files, but hadn't uninstalled it - which I've now done. That's freed up a gig or 2, so we're no longer critical...

But where is the missing storage being used??? And how can I clear it out or make used memory = all the space used by files / folders I can see added up?

Ironically, the SD card is basically empty. Pretty much everything is on internal storage.

 

[britechguy]

Have you tried soft resetting the device? [You'll have to look up the steps for this model, there will be literally hundreds of tutorials on doing soft and hard resets out on the internet.]

 

[kerangovender]

if you can, set the default storage to the memory card

 

[James Blonde]

Soft reset hasn't really helped.

I've got 4.33gb free, and obvious use (what its telling me it's using) around 700mb in images, video, documents, other, etc, 788mb in apps and 603mb in system files.

However having gone into the installed apps settings and adding up space taken up by the installed apps, I'm getting maybe 5-6gb on installed apps - not the 788mb the disk manager suggests.

So.. Uh... That probably explains where most of the missing my drive space has gone, but where are you supposed to look to get all of this info in one place?? Storage doesn't tell you, third party apps don't tell you, seems like that's pretty fundamental information that should be easy to find out, and you have to work out yourself my digging into different parts of the settings or apps!

Or am I missing something??