The storage menu on your Samsung phone gives a clear breakdown of where your internal storage is going. You get a clear idea of how your space is split between images, videos, audio files, documents, apps, trash, and everything else. Among these, though, there’s a category called “Other files” that often goes unnoticed.
This is basically a catch-all category, which includes everything that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. While it’s easy to miss, it can grow into a monster. We are talking about anywhere from a few gigabytes to well over 100 GB on some phones. In my case, it was eating up almost 15GB, which is significant on a 128GB phone.
What are “Other files,” anyway?
The hidden storage hog
In the older versions of One UI, Samsung never exactly mentioned what these “Other files” included. Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. Head to Settings > Device care > Storage. Then tap Show more, choose Other files, and you’ll see three categories: Invisible backups, Pending files, and Uncategorized.
Invisible backups are files that are created every time you edit a photo or video in the Samsung Gallery app. These are essentially older versions of images and videos. The Gallery app keeps them so you can undo your edits and recover original media at any time. In most cases, though, these backups are unnecessary and can be removed.
Pending files include anything that hasn’t been fully uploaded, downloaded, moved, or deleted yet. For instance, if you started a download in Chrome and stopped it halfway through, that partially downloaded file may not show up in your regular folders but still take up storage. This section includes all those leftovers.
Uncategorized, as the name suggests, includes everything that doesn’t fall into either of the categories. On top of what you see in these three sections, Other files also include things like app caches, system files, and temporary files. They don’t show up in the storage menu, but they are part of the total number you see.
Getting rid of these other files is possible, just not easy
There’s no one-tap solution
The good news is that you’re not completely powerless against Other files. The bad news is that Samsung doesn’t hand you a big, friendly “Delete all” button to get rid of them.
Let’s start with the easy part. In the storage menu on your Samsung phone, you’ll see the delete option for Invisible backups. You simply need to tap the All option at the top and hit Delete > Delete files to confirm. Of course, these invisible files are only one part. In my case, for instance, deleting them only freed up 3.26GB out of nearly 15GB.
When you select items in the Pending files and Uncategorized section, it’ll only show the Details option. This means you can only see where those files are saved and not delete them directly from this menu. The only way to get rid of them is to open the File Manager, hunt down these files, and delete them. You can also use a third-party app like SD Maid SE to clear them.
Besides these, app caches can also make up a large portion of Other files. Streaming apps, browsers, and social media apps are especially guilty here. But the good thing is that Samsung phones are among the few Android brands that let you delete cache data of all the apps on your phones at once. You can do this by heading to Settings > Device care > Storage > App cache.
Note that this option doesn’t seem to appear on all Samsung phones. If you don’t see it on yours, you’ll need to head to the Apps menu and clear the cache for each app individually. For that, simply select the app from the list, select Storage, and hit Clear cache.
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You’ll never reduce it to zero, and that’s okay
Some of this storage is meant to stay
Even after all this cleanup, don’t be surprised if Other files still refuse to drop to zero. That’s because it still includes system files and other temporary files. And some of these are necessary for your Samsung phone to operate.
Technically, the only way to clear this is to factory reset your Samsung phone. That, however, isn’t worth the effort because it only fixes the problem temporarily. After a while, you can expect the Other files to build up again. At this point, the best thing to do is leave them as they are. They shouldn’t be taking more than a few gigabytes after you clear everything.
Clearing storage space on a phone isn’t always as simple as it seems. Most of us delete a few photos and apps, and that usually removes any storage warnings. But doing only that often means missing hidden files that are sitting on your phone. Removing these useless hidden files gave my Samsung phone much-needed breathing room, which means I don’t have to worry about the storage situation for a few weeks at least.
