GoKawiilWith the cost of SSDs and hard drives through the roof, more of us are relying on cloud storage to warehouse the detritus of our digital lives. But even that doesn't come cheap, and chewing through it with careless abandon is far easier than you might realize. Even if you're the kind of person who keeps tight tabs on your file system, things can slip through the cracks in ways that are difficult to detect.
On Android, the default cloud backup option is the obvious one. Google, which owns the operating system, integrates device backups with your Google account storage. The amount of storage you have access to is small by default — just 15GB for free users — and is metered across all Google products, from Gmail to Drive, and yes, your phone's backup now counts against your account-wide storage. You can shell out for ludicrously capacious storage caps, of course, but by that same token, you push yourself toward the next tier up with every wasted byte. And you're probably wasting more of them than you think.
The key here is that Google Photos, the media backup solution of least resistance on Android, also counts toward your Google storage cap. Thanks to the way other apps handle their backups, you could be filling your storage with duplicate files in a way that isn't immediately noticeable. And you can save even more space by getting rid of the often unnecessary backups Google makes of completely useless app data. Here's how to claw back those precious gigabytes.