Use SD card (or part of it) as internal storage

Question

I recently rooted and installed CyanogenMod 10 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7" tablet. My main purpose for doing this was to get rid of the bloatware that came with it so I could have more apps because I was running out of space. However, after installing even fewer apps than I had pre-root, I'm getting insufficient storage error.

I'm guessing there are a couple of solutions for this. I probably have something taking up space that I'm unaware of that can/needs to be removed. There may also be an option to use the SD card as "internal storage"? How do I identify the root of the problem and fix it?

Answer 1

There are a quite a few options.

1. Open Terminal Emulator and check with the 'df' command, how much space is left on your partitions. Is /data or /system full?

2. Goto system/apps/all > 'Sort by size to' find out which apps eat up the most space.

3. Check if you have big size apps installed where you could change data location within the app to sdcard. Thinking of navigation apps and games. Every app where you have to download additional data to the actual app.

4. Make sure you use the sdcard for media like photos (camera settings) music and video.

5. CM has a built-in system to move apps to SD under settings/apps/on sdcard. Check apps that are big and you use rarely and are not interactive first. Reason: If you still use the USB feature those moved apps are not available to system anymore and are least likely to cause trouble.

6. Another option is to use the app FolderMount. Use it to move certain locations to SD like the Download* folder. Or the DCIM folder if the camera doesn't support sdcard location in settings.

7. Use the app Link2SD which is able to move every bit from an app (including app data) to SD. It has a good overview on how much space an app really needs. You will have to create a separate partition on the SD card for that to work.