Using Cloud to Save Storage Space on your phone

Advances in the smartphone technologies and Internet of Things has led to one very genuine restraint, storage space. The size of apps, smartphone camera photos and videos, and browser downloads, is increasing day by day. Then there are the unlimited data plans on offer, which prompt us to store even more data, eventually eating up our phone’s onboard storage space.

However, the spread of cloud technologies has come as a godsend for people who are always running out of space on their phones. In this post, we look at ways you can use a cloud storage service to save space on your smartphone.

Google Photos Cloud Storage

One of the biggest memory hogs are the pictures and videos stored on our smartphones. Selfie lovers often find themselves run out of storage space because of the high resolution front camera phones coming out nowadays. Even if you are not used to clicking too many self-portraits throughout the day, pictures and videos shared via WhatsApp and other messenger services inadvertently end up in our picture gallery.

Google Photos app is a gallery app which uses cloud storage to save your media files. The app can be downloaded for free from the Android Play Store. Newer Android phones generally come with the app pre-installed. You can enable cloud storage by following these simple steps.

Open Google Photos > Settings Menu > Select “Back up all photos and video over Wi-Fi”

Once the upload is complete, open your Normal Gallery App and delete the pictures and videos from there. Please note, you should not delete the media from within your Google Photos app.

Use Google Drive for File Storage

We generally have a lot of other downloaded files, such as music and documents in our phone’s ‘Downloads’ folder. You can save space by clearing out older downloads. In case your downloads folder contains a ton of content for you to curate and clean up, you can move the entire folder to the Google Drive and safely delete everything from the phone’s storage.

Moreover, apps such as WhatsApp also support Google Drive backups. Enabling the feature from the WhatsApp settings menu will not only save more space on your phone, but will also let you keep your chats and settings when buying a new Android phone.

Dropbox, OneDrive & Co.

There are a number of popular cloud platforms out there, in case you run out of your Google Drive’s Free Storage. These services offer various levels of integration with popular Android apps and can let you store a large number of data files for free.

While saving everything in the cloud sounds cool, we do need physical storage since we are still some distance away from universal internet access. Buying latest Android smartphones with more on-board storage and MicroSD card support is a good idea to keep a few gigabytes handy for emergency storage and content sharing. Lava Mobiles has recently launched a number of premium mid-segment handsets with great performance and higher on-board storage. You can check out the complete list of Lava smartphones