[MadSci2]

The problems with WP8 and the ever increasing "Other" memory category are well known so I won't go into it here. Yesterday I stumbled across a free App in the Marketplace called "Shrink Storage" by Developer Manu Bauer and it is a real lifesaver!

From what I can gatehr it works by somehow filling up all the available storage space on your phone (scary sounding!), which is then re-booted and the App then clears out the space it had filled up. In some manner this also reduces space in the "Other" category. I presume that the OS gives access to some amount of pre-assigned or 'lost' space within this category to the App, which 'owns' it by virtue of writing to it. After the re-boot is it able to release that storage, along with all the space that was 'Free' that it wrote to.

The bottom line is it works. It took about 15 minutes to write to all the space on my phone (Lumia 920), but here were the results:

Before: Total Free Storage - 5.03 Gb Amount of "Other" Storage - 9.6Gb
AFTER: Total Free Storage - 6.73 Gb Amount of "Other" Storage - 7.87Gb

Net Gain of Free Storage: 1.7Gb!

The App has excellent Reviews in the Marketplace and there are no complaints of any negative effects. The amount of storage freed up varies quite a bit, but recovery of 0.5 to 1.5 Gb is fairly common.

I will be using this app frequently form now on, and I want to give a big THANK YOU! to the Dev who has done more for us to deal with this problem with the OS than Microsoft has!

Disclaimer - I have no connection to the Dev at all, and obviously use the App at your own risk.!

MadSci

[congusano]

I found that by deleting your internet explorer history, that can often free up quite a bit. Almost 500mb for me.

[MadSci2]

I do that about once a month or so. Results of course vary a lot. There are other Apps, particularly news apps that tend to archive back issues a lot. Definitely worth checking out the results after deleting the history or cache of every app you have to see if there's a bad actor in there somewhere. :-)

[dainla]

6.97 down to 6.92.

Not much.

Maybe because I clear IE occasionally.

[avsef]

How long does it take to fill your memory? It says it make take "several minutes", but has been running for nearly an hour on my phone. Making me nervous.

[dainla]

How long does it take to fill your memory? It says it make take "several minutes", but has been running for nearly an hour on my phone. Making me nervous.

Took about a minute for me.

[cameradork]

I have a 32GB Nokia 920 that had about 9GB free (13GB of "Other" memory). Running the app now, and it's been going for 15 min so far.

*edit* took about 20 mins, did nothing. Still have 13GB of "Other". Oh well.

[dkp23]

Tried this app yesterday. Didn't do anything.

[AskaLangly]

Removed 40MB. After filling a DVD-5 sized space. Seriously?

[morpheus1982]

this app is useless or inconsistent at best. MS need to sort it!

[avsef]

After grinding for 4 hours, reduced Other Storage all of 500KB. Promptly deleted it.

[cashcar1979]

Didn't do anything for me either...MSFT really doesn't give a rats *** about this platform. There should be a real fix for this by now versus senseless rhetoric.

[Dratwister]

So basically it made use the mechanism of "so call" auto free up Others disk space from Microsoft eh? As they said the Others section should auto free up when there's need for more space :-?

Another thing I need to confirm. Is anyone compare free space between viewing on phone and viewing on PC? Cause the last time I do it, the free space on phone tell me it's 13,37GB free while on PC, after plugging in USB, it displayed the otherwise: more than 16GB free space which is sum of free space on phone and Others section (3GB for me)

[Jazmac]

I ran it overnight and in the morning, it was still churning along. I don't have that much on my device so unless it doesn't run under the lock screen, it didn't do anything for me. I never got a result.

[Villain]

shrink storage cleared up almost 3gb for me BUT I still had an intense amount of other storage used. factory reset cause I had next to nothing on the device.