Saturday 8 June 2013

Storage Full on Windows Phone 7.8

I’ve been lucky enough to have received a fair few phones from Microsoft and Nokia for developing on the platform, and have passed them around my extended family.

I gave one of my Lumia 710 devices to my 86 year old father-in-law, who I’ve been slowly dragging into the modern age of computing over the past 25 years.  Don’t get me wrong: He worked at Ferranti working some of the earliest commercial computers, but things have changed a bit since the days of 1024x40 bits of core memory.

But you still run out of memory even today.  We found that something on the phone was using up all of the storage on the phone.  It got to the stage, where nothing was working, because no-one was able to update their isolated storage files. Worse, uninstalling apps one by one didn’t enlighten us.  There was still about 3gb unaccounted for.

In the end, we did a total reset of the phone, and then re-downloaded everything.  After that we had a reasonable amount of memory free, but I don’t have any confidence that we won’t be doing all of this again in the future.

It’s a shame that there isn’t more transparent access to the storage on being used on Windows Phone 7.x, so that users can find out which app is being a bad citizen and spoiling the Windows Phone party for everyone.

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