I’ve been using my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 for over a year, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been getting low storage notifications. So, I did the obvious thing and deleted a bunch of old photos and videos, cleared out downloads, and uninstalled apps I hadn’t opened in months, which is usually the biggest storage hog on a phone. The free space would go up for a day or two, and then the warnings would come back.
I opened the Settings app again to see what was taking up all the space, and found the Other Files section. On One UI, this option isn’t visible unless you tap Show more, which reveals a few extra categories, including the Recycle bin. But Other Files was the one that stood out. Over 20 GB of data was sitting in there, and that’s where my storage had been going.
The usual storage cleanup didn’t work
The numbers didn’t add up even after I deleted everything I could
Before I went looking for Other files, I ran through the usual cleanup routine I’d done a dozen times before. My gallery was the first suspect, and I’d already cleaned up a 20,000-photo mess a few months earlier, so I was surprised to see it creeping back up. I went through the Camera roll again, deleted screenshots, and emptied the Recycle bin. I also cleared the Downloads folder and archived a few apps I hadn’t opened in months.
Once the cleanup was done, I went back to the Storage page and still a large chunk of its 256 GB was in use, but when I added up the visible categories, Images, Videos, Audio, Apps, Documents, the totals came nowhere close to that number. There was a gap of several tens of gigabytes between what the phone said was being used and what I could actually see listed.
If the categories on the Storage page are meant to show what’s taking up space, they should add up to roughly what the phone reports as used. Instead, a big slice of my storage was unaccounted for, and no amount of deleting photos or apps was going to touch it, because I couldn’t even see where it was.
The mystery of Other files
Three tabs that tell you what’s actually in there
Most cleanup advice you’ll find focuses on media and apps, which makes sense because those are the categories you can see in the Storage view. What I didn’t realize is that my phone also has a catch-all category called Other files, and it was quietly holding more data than my photos, videos, and apps combined.
Other storage is where your phone dumps everything it can’t neatly sort into Images, Videos, Audio, Documents, or Apps. That includes system files, app data that doesn’t fall into a standard type, cached files, and various temporary files.
From the Storage page, tap Other files, and Samsung gives you a breakdown split into three tabs: Invisible backups, Pending files, and Uncategorised. Samsung’s own support page doesn’t even mention this breakdown. As of its last update, the documentation still tells you that Other storage can’t be explored and can only be reduced indirectly through clearing app cache, but it’s accessible.
Here’s what I found inside Other storage. Invisible backups on my phone held 300 files, taking up 1.81 GB. These turn out to be duplicate copies of photos I’d edited in the Samsung Gallery app. Every time you edit a photo, the Gallery keeps the original as a safety net, and those copies pile up silently.
Then Pending files had 5,869 files at 4.18 GB, which sounds alarming until you see what’s in there, mostly .nomedia marker files that apps use to tell the Gallery not to index a folder, plus a few stuck transfers.
Finally, Uncategorised was the biggest at 29,157 files and 5.02 GB, and it was almost entirely WhatsApp. The top of the list was filled with msgstore-incr-*.db.crypt14 files, which are WhatsApp’s rolling daily encrypted database backups.
Seeing this breakdown was the first time I’d ever had a clear answer to where my storage was going, even if I can’t claim it all back instantly.
The cleanup is harder than it looks
You can only delete from one of the three tabs
Finding out what was in Other Files felt like a win, but the cleanup turned out to be trickier than I expected. Samsung only lets you delete files directly from one of the three tabs. Invisible backups has full delete controls, so I cleared almost the entire 1.81 GB there without any issues. These are duplicates of photos I’d already edited and saved, so losing them wasn’t a concern.
The other two tabs are a different story. Both Pending files and Uncategorised only offer a Details option, which shows you the file name and location, but doesn’t let you delete anything from that screen. You have to note the location, switch to the My Files app or the relevant source app, and delete the files from there. It’s a multi-step process.
To shrink the Other storage further, you can try to manually clear the app cache for the affected apps. To do this, open Settings > Apps, pick the app that’s hogging space, tap Storage, and then tap Clear cache or Clear data. Clearing the cache is safe. Clearing data will wipe your logins and settings for that app, so I’d stick to the cache option unless you know what you’re doing.
What I ended up doing was a mix of both. For the WhatsApp database backups that filled the Uncategorised tab, I opened WhatsApp’s own storage management screen and deleted what I didn’t need. For the .nomedia files and random leftovers in Pending files, I left most of them alone because they’re usually doing a job. The whole process got me back around 8 to 10 GB, which was enough to stop the low storage warnings for now.
- Brand
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Samsung
- SoC
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Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 is a stylish, foldable smartphone featuring a dynamic 6.7-inch AMOLED internal display and a durable hinge mechanism. Equipped with the latest Snapdragon processor, it delivers outstanding performance, an enhanced dual-camera system, and Flex Mode for convenient hands-free selfies and video calls.
The missing storage was never really missing
The thing I keep coming back to is that the storage was never actually missing. It was all there on the phone, just sorted into a category Samsung doesn’t show you by default and doesn’t give you clean tools to empty. Once I knew where to look, the accounting gap closed rather quickly. The visible categories plus what was sitting in Other storage matched what the phone said was in use.
