Beta testers wanted: NES, tool to manage data partition

cyansmoker · Nov 27, 2010

Update 03/08/11

NotEnoughSpace has finally graduated to the Android Marketplace!
Beta testers can currently get it at its "thank you" price of $0.99.
I will set the regular price in a week so hurry

*** *** *** ***

Note #1: your phone needs to be ROOTED to use this application.
Note #2: so far, only tested on Droid Incredible and HTC Desire.

From the built-in help:

About this application

This application's goal is to help you understand and possibly work around a common vexation of using Android; i.e. these messages:

"not enough space"
"Low on space. Application data space is low."

What is happening?

You've checked your phone's vitals and it appears that it has plenty of space left, both internal storage and SD Card storage. So, what's happening?
Android allows your applications to store their data, primarily, in a dedicated partition whose size happens to be much smaller than even the phone's internal storage space. Generally south of 150 MBs.
This is the partition that fills up so quickly and that Android has been complaining about.

And the help goes on and on so I'll stop here.

The short version

Using this application, you can see which applications use up most of your phone's data space and decide what to do with them.
You can also move the biggest directories to the phone's SD Card.

Additionally, you can use the app to cleanup the Dalvik cache but it's not the app's primary function.

Please, help test it!

I will gladly welcome any constructive criticism; I expect most of it to be along the lines of "The tool is not quite accurate" and that's what I wish to address first.

To create a debug report (these are very important):
Simply select the "Debug" menu and follow the on-screen instructions.
The whole email business is so that you can copy/paste from a desktop client.

The .apk can be downloaded from nexus.zteo.com/projects/beta/

Update 12/04/10

The application should now display correct stats for phones/ROMs that use Busybox. If you have already tested it and it said "NaN" please try it again.

teorouge · Nov 27, 2010

This should be interesting, maybe kinda Android GpartED?

khaytsus · Nov 27, 2010

cyansmoker said:
Using this application, you can see which applications use up most of your phone's data space and decide what to do with them.
You can also move the biggest directories to the phone's SD Card.

Curious, does this mean you can move and symlink data, or are you talking about Froyo Apps2SD?

teorouge said:
This should be interesting, maybe kinda Android GpartED?

Obviously not, he's managing what's there, he's not partitioning anything.. Did you read?

teorouge · Nov 27, 2010

khaytsus said:
Obviously not, he's managing what's there, he's not partitioning anything.. Did you read?

Come on, what's the matter dude? I did read, and from what I read I thought whole partition handling was the only thing this app would be missing. Single files is a good start, but making that "kinda GpartED" would be killer. Though I fear you should be in bootloader/recovery to work on those, don't know how Android deals with them (i.e. in Windows you have programs you can change partitions size "on the fly" with). Now that I elaborated more, are you still angry?

omgi0wn · Nov 27, 2010

This application would be genius. I'm wondering however, will the phone still be able to access that data once it is moved off of the system memory and onto the SD Card? And is it possible to actually partition the /data/data section so that it will use more than the allowed 150mb that it has, like open it up so that instead of it being partitioned to a small amount, it just roams free with the rest of the 748mb or whatever that is in the system memory.

mizch · Nov 27, 2010

A promising app, thanks.

Navigon, however, doesn't like its data to be moved to SD card. Even after moving it back with the app, it FCs (Android 2.1). I think I have to reinstall. So be careful if you're trying to do the same.

Edit: After reinstalling the .apk (without doing anything with the maps), Navigon works again. The packet installer didn't ask me if I wanted to replace the existing installation (as is otherwise usual in such a case).

Edit2: There seems to be a general problem. The next app I tried was mediaU. It has a large database which I moved (using NES) to the SD card. It also FCed after having moved its database, and restoring to the old location (again using NES) also didn't succeed. No error message during restore, but app still won't run.

Phone: Galaxy 3, Android 2.1 (original ROM).

teorouge · Nov 27, 2010

mizch said:
A promising app, thanks.

Navigon, however, doesn't like its data to be moved to SD card. Even after moving it back with the app, it FCs (Android 2.1). I think I have to reinstall. So be careful if you're trying to do the same.

Edit: After reinstalling the .apk (without doing anything with the maps), Navigon works again. The packet installer didn't ask me if I wanted to replace the existing installation (as is otherwise usual in such a case).

Edit2: There seems to be a general problem. The next app I tried was mediaU. It has a large database which I moved (using NES) to the SD card. It also FCed after having moved its database, and restoring to the old location (again using NES) also didn't succeed. No error message during restore, but app still won't run.

Phone: Galaxy 3, Android 2.1 (original ROM).

Tonight I'm gonna try for sure and report back, this does look promising! Did you succeed with some apps?

mizch · Nov 27, 2010

teorouge said:
Did you succeed with some apps?

K9 seemed to work. However, I had to reflash for another reason, and now K9 reports its lib as being in the standard location (reported by NES). For now, I have stopped testing NotEnoughSpace so I can not say more.

khaytsus · Nov 28, 2010

mizch said:
K9 seemed to work. However, I had to reflash for another reason, and now K9 reports its lib as being in the standard location (reported by NES). For now, I have stopped testing NotEnoughSpace so I can not say more.

eh? K9 has native use of the SD card if you enable it... Why would you use this on it?

cyansmoker · Nov 28, 2010

Thanks for doing this testing, guys.
I will install these apps and test them myself.

teorouge: you moved the database/ directory, is that it?

mizch: so, you re-installed K9 after reflashing, right?

Everybody: what about the "free space" numbers reported by the app? Do they seem correct to you? I had to use a dedicated algo to compute them, taking block size in account, and I've had reports of fairly surprising discrepancies.

teorouge · Nov 28, 2010

Free space doesn't seem to update after moving, though I see the difference in the Titanium Backup count: tried for a couple of apps (G Earth and well... don't remember!) and it did move everything, free up space on /data and I can still use those apps. Still afraid to move many apps, just moving one at the time and test.

bdt1995 · Nov 28, 2010

I just tested it out on my Droid 1, which is running CM6.1RC5 (Not sure if thats relevant or not), and it doesnt seem to work very well on my phone. All apps came back as 4KB, at the top it showed this... Total:261.8MB Used:NaNKB Free: 259.1MB Database NaNKB Files: NaNKB Preferences:NaNKB Cache:NaNKB.

Heres the debug report: 1:/dev/block/mtdblock6 268032 224572 43460 84% /data
2:62855 /data/data
3:4096/0/265352

lhinsz · Nov 28, 2010

Sorry - never mind; found the info in FAQ.txt after downloading

cyansmoker said:
Note #1: your phone needs to be ROOTED to use this application.
Note #2: so far, only tested on Droid Incredible and HTC Desire.

From the built-in help:

About this application

This application's goal is to help you understand and possibly work around a common vexation of using Android; i.e. these messages:

"not enough space"
"Low on space. Application data space is low."

What is happening?

You've checked your phone's vitals and it appears that it has plenty of space left, both internal storage and SD Card storage. So, what's happening?
Android allows your applications to store their data, primarily, in a dedicated partition whose size happens to be much smaller than even the phone's internal storage space. Generally south of 150 MBs.
This is the partition that fills up so quickly and that Android has been complaining about.

And the help goes on and on so I'll stop here.

The short version

Using this application, you can see which applications use up most of your phone's data space and decide what to do with them.
You can also move the biggest directories to the phone's SD Card.

Additionally, you can use the app to cleanup the Dalvik cache but it's not the app's primary function.

Please, help test it!

I will gladly welcome any constructive criticism; I expect most of it to be along the lines of "The tool is not quite accurate" and that's what I wish to address first.

To create a debug report:
Simply select the "Debug" menu and follow the on-screen instructions.
The whole email business is so that you can copy/paste from a desktop client.

The .apk can be downloaded from nexus.zteo.com/projects/beta/

Do you have more details about this program anywhere? I went to the download page but see no further info...

JerseyFF · Nov 28, 2010

Help Section Typo

Under A Quick user guide in your user guide(?) that prompts when you run the apk for the first time there is a typo in the last sentence:

You can touch any application to explore its content and figure out what is taking up some much space.

So far I havent run into any issues with the apk...

Zandog · Nov 28, 2010

Not to burst anyones bubble, but Choose Install Location has been doing this in a comprehensive way for weeks. http://www.appbrain.com/app/choose-install-location-free/com.beidl.chooseloc

rnh16 · Nov 28, 2010

Free Memory?

bdt1995 said:
I just tested it out on my Droid 1, which is running CM6.1RC5 (Not sure if thats relevant or not), and it doesnt seem to work very well on my phone. All apps came back as 4KB, at the top it showed this... Total:261.8MB Used:NaNKB Free: 259.1MB Database NaNKB Files: NaNKB Preferences:NaNKB Cache:NaNKB.

I'm having the same problem as bdt1995. Running CM 6.1 RC1.. the only difference is the total memory is 196.2 and the free is:194.3 MB cuz I'm using a Nexus.. CM6 might be the problem?

britoso · Nov 28, 2010

bdt1995 said:
I just tested it out on my Droid 1, which is running CM6.1RC5 (Not sure if thats relevant or not), and it doesnt seem to work very well on my phone. All apps came back as 4KB, at the top it showed this... Total:261.8MB Used:NaNKB Free: 259.1MB Database NaNKB Files: NaNKB Preferences:NaNKB Cache:NaNKB.

Heres the debug report: 1:/dev/block/mtdblock6 268032 224572 43460 84% /data
2:62855 /data/data
3:4096/0/265352

Same here (total 196.2MB, Free 194.3MB, all apps 4KB), system details in my sig. Using apps2sdext, over 200 apps.

Debug info:

Code:

1:/dev/block/mtdblock5    200960    112144     88816  56% /data
2:96070	/data/data
3:4096/0/198951

mmorselli · Nov 28, 2010

Same problem as above with Cyanogen 6.02, However it looks promising.

I Think that moving data to standard SD can leads to security issue, because SD can be readed and written by any apps. Should be better if the app recognize /EXT partition, if exist, and move data here.

BigNate · Nov 29, 2010

i'd like to try it and i get my lil sis to try it also she gets this problem a lot i have the droid incredible and my sis has the droid eris.

cyansmoker · Nov 29, 2010

bdt1995, rnh16, britoso, mmorselli:

Thanks for the debug info. Indeed Cyanogen is a tad "exotic" for NES at this point.
Please download the latest version of NES -- I just uploaded it. It contains an extra debug line which should allow me to make it work so please paste your debug output here one more time.

JerseyFF:

Oops, thanks.

lhinsz:

Because it is a beta version, it hasn't been released yet and all the information you may need is contained in the Help screen. I tried to make it comprehensive.

BigNate:

Should work with HTC devices, yes. Could you or you sister paste her phone's debug screen here?

Zandog:

I do not think that both apps share the same goal so no lives should be lost (Seriously, not much of a bubble to burst?)

Beta testers wanted: NES, tool to manage data partition

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