Storage full (2020)

With the advent of smartphones in our lives, many things have become really easy for us. The smartphone is our only go-to thing nowadays storing all the secret chats, videos, images etc., hence, everyone stays glued to it.
Since we store everything in our phones hence, there arises a situation where a notification pops up stating "Storage full, delete some files to create some space". This notification often results in bank account getting debited as a new memory card is needed to cope with the situation. In most of the situations, we end up buying one even if it could have been avoided totally.
One of the reasons for such storage problem is one of the most used messaging app in the world(that is why Facebook bought it), yes, it's Whatsapp, the favorite app for all age groups.
Whatsapp stores everything from our gossips to our "Good morning" messages as shown in the image below.

Messages and videos are a common thing we see in WhatsApp and share them with our loved ones. Some people even do not delete those messages thinking "Kabhi kisi ko bhejne ke kam aega" and store them forever in the unexplored corners of their phone storage. Now, saving all those pictures and videos is fine until your storage gets filled up with such would-be-needed things. The storage of your device gradually fills up when you share any image, video, audio, docs etc through WhatsApp. No, it is not a malware that fills your storage but it is done by Whatsapp only. Even if this was not enough, the more chats you have on your WhatsApp, the more storage it will need.
Now, all the above-mentioned things can be avoided by buying a memory card but guess what?, it will help you only if you have a smartphone that allows the app data to be moved to the memory card but sadly not all the phones allow this. So, this means that all the other phones are stuck, right?, Nope! there is always a Jugaad or Lifehack(what they call it in the west) that can help you to manage your space well.
Now what you have to do is simply go to the WhatsApp folder in your file manager and delete some data from it, not the actual data but the copy of it that WhatsApp had made for situations where you delete WhatsApp for one day and after a few days come back again. For situations like this, WhatsApp makes a backup of all your chats every day. This is not the only way WhatsApp uses your storage, there's another way that takes up a huge space in your device's memoru. This is totally different as compared to making chat backups, what WhatsApp does is, every time you send a video or image to anyone, it makes a copy of it and stores it and the next time you send that video again, it creates another copy to send thus leading to the file taking more storage than needed as it duplicates are also stored in your phone storage.
There is an easy way to avoid such duplication and it is actually really easy. Let me tell you how to make more space in your phone storage.

1) Deleting the chats backup

Here are the steps to delete obsolete chat backups:

• You have to go to files manager and go to WhatsApp folder
• Go to database, in database folder, you will find various encrypted backup of your messages, leave the latest backup and delete all the older ones, deleting the whole database folder won't affect your current chats as the files you deleted are just backups.

Every day the messages are backed up as in the image above

2) Deleting the duplicate  videos, images, and audios

For this, you have to follow the below mentioned steps:

• Go to the WhatsApp folder and open media folder and there you will find many folders like WhatsApp images, WhatsApp videos, WhatsApp audio etc. 
• Open any folder, for instance, WhatsApp video folder, in that folder, open the sent folder.
•  Select all and delete all if you want to or keep one copy and delete the remaining copies.

As you can see, the last video is just a copy of the third video above it. Congrats! You have cleared a huge chunk of data from your device and now you can postpone the idea of buying a new memory card in the near future.
Do you have any other way to deal with low storage issues that you would like to share?

Well, I like the second method more as it saves more storage.

Do share this article with all who need to know these tips.

Thanks for reading.