How to fix storage issues on the Samsung Galaxy Ace

15 Feb 2015

Low memory is an all-too familiar problem for entry-level smartphone users, especially owners of older handsets like the Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830). Let's take a look at how to free up space and get rid of those low-storage warning messages.

Our Agents have written a general smartphone storage & memory guide which has some great advice on freeing up space, no matter which platform your phone is on. Packed full of hints and tips about managing apps and their updates, clearing temporary (cache) data and using cloud storage, it's the perfect starting point to resolving your storage woes., so if we haven't haven't resolved your problem on this page, why not check out what other advice our Agents have to offer!

STILL HAVING PROBLEMS?

We’ve noticed that a few Galaxy Ace smartphones never seem to recover much memory space, even after performing the steps listed here. This is usually caused by the Contacts app filling up your internal storage as soon as you free a bit of extra space. If you’ve cleared data from larger apps like Facebook or Google Maps and are still having storage issues, it’s worth checking to see whether you've fallen victim to this particular bug.

To find out if your device is having this problem, follow the steps below:

1. Open your Apps list and tap on the Settings icon, then scroll down and tap onApplications.
2. Touch on Manage Applications and tap All at the top of the screen. This will show you a full list of all apps currently installed on your Galaxy Ace.
3. Scroll down and locate Contacts Storage.

Typically this should only be a few hundred kilobytes (KB) at most, if it’s anything more than a few megabytes then it may well be that your device is having this issue. In our example, you can see Contacts Storage actually takes up 12.23MB on our Galaxy Ace.

Fixing the problem isn’t as straightforward as just deleting the data from the app as this can very easily wipe your contacts from your Samsung phone. Before deleting the data you’ll need to back up your contacts first. If they’re already in your Google account then you don’t need to worry, if not then you can back them up to your SD card to keep them safe.

Backing up your contacts

1. Open the Contacts app on your handset. This is found either in your Apps list or at the bottom of your Home screen, and has a silhouette of a person on its icon.
2. Tap the Menu button, which is the bottom-left button on the phone (below the screen).
3. Choose Import/Export.
4. Tap Export to SD Card, then confirm the export by tapping Yes.

Once you've confirmed that you wish to export your contacts, this will place a copy of your contacts safely on your phone's memory card. We can restore this file after we've applied the fix.

Fixing the problem

Now that your contacts are backed up somewhere safe, we can clear the memory your contacts are taking up and free up some precious internal storage space.

1. As before, head in to Settings.
2. Scroll down the Settings list, then press on Applications. Choose Manage Applicationsto continue.
3. Select the All tab at the top of the screen.
4. Locate Contacts Storage from the list and tap on it.
5. Now press on the Clear Data button.

This will delete any locally stored contact information on the phone's internal memory. Finally,reboot your handset by holding down the power button and choosing power off.

Restoring your contacts

If your phone is set to synchronise with Google then the contacts should reappear when the phone turns back on. If you backed them up to the SD card by following the instructions listed above, you can retrieve them easily from these steps:

1. Open up the Contacts application from either your Apps list or the icon on your Home screen.
2. Tap the Menu button.
3. Choose the Import/Export option.
4. Press on Import from SD Card.
5. You can choose to either import them to your Google account or back to the phone memory.

So far we’ve only encountered this issue on the Samsung Galaxy Ace, so it may only affect older versions of the Android software like Gingerbread 2.3. This issue could also appear on similar handsets like the HTC Wildfire, so if you find your Contacts app is taking up way too much space, try our guide and see how much space you can free up!