Save space in your Google storage by changing this Android setting

With the cost of SSDs and hard drives skyrocketing, more and more of us are relying on cloud storage to store the detritus of our digital lives. But even that doesn’t come cheap, and chewing it carelessly is much easier than you think. Even if you’re the type of person who closely monitors your file system, things can slip through the cracks in a way that’s difficult to detect.

On Android, the default cloud backup option is the most obvious. 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 backup now counts towards your entire account’s storage. You can of course shell out for ridiculously large storage caps, but by the same token, you’re pushing yourself to the next level with every wasted byte. And you’re probably wasting more than you think.

The key here is that Google Photos, the lowest-strength media backup solution on Android, also counts toward your Google storage cap. Thanks to the way other apps handle their backups, you might be filling up your storage with duplicate files in a way that isn’t immediately noticeable. And you can save even more space by deleting the often unnecessary backups that Google makes of completely unnecessary app data. Here’s how to get those precious gigabytes back.

Like most WhatsApp users, I take advantage of its built-in backup feature to store my data in Google Drive. And, like many Android users, I still use Google Photos to back up my personal photos and videos. Both of these count toward the 5 terabyte cap on my current Google One plan, so imagine my surprise when I realized that backing up all of my device’s folders in Google Photos backed up my WhatsApp folder – you know, the one that WhatsApp already backs up for me in Drive. This meant that I let these photos and videos be backed up in two separate locations, both of which counted against my Google storage limits.

This same scenario could happen with any app that stores media on your device and where you save media somewhere other than Google Photos, be it Signal, Telegram, or even Discord. But here’s another tip: Most of the media your messaging apps keep in your phone’s local storage is already garbage. Do you need all those recycled Twitter reaction GIFs from the 2010s that your idiot friends were using in the group chat? What about the baby photos your sibling sends during the family chat? Let’s face it: as cute as they are, kids aren’t cute enough to justify the space these photos take up, and you can delete all but the few best photos. Delete excess media before it’s even backed up, and you’ve immediately saved double the space on your cloud storage, and triple that when you factor in the space you’ll get back on your phone’s local drive.

Don’t forget to delete these photos and videos from Google Photos after turning off folder backup. Google has an incentive to keep them, both to ingest them into its Gemini AI and to make you run out of storage faster in order to upgrade, and so they must be deleted separately.

Once you’ve eliminated the biggest space wasters in the form of media-rich backups, you can optimize even further by reducing the number of apps backed up from your phone. Backup settings can be accessed from the Google section of Android Settings or through the Google One app, and you can see which apps are backing up data by tapping More device data, then scrolling down and tapping Show more in the App data section. You may be shocked to discover how many apps have found it necessary to tap into your cloud storage.

First, there are apps, like WhatsApp, that I don’t want backups for, but still create backups, through the options in the apps themselves. Personally, my Joplin notes are backed up to Dropbox using the app’s own settings, and my Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones settings are backed up to Sony’s servers. Disabling both was an easy decision.

But looking in my backup settings, I found saved app data for dozens of apps that I don’t care about. Since its only function is to provide me with real-time information about device performance, what possible data might CPU-Z need to back up with Google? Same for my guitar tuner app, my VLC media player, and a Google TV debugging tool that I use to load apps on my cable box. Then there are the apps where backup isn’t necessary because they’re entirely account-based: Bluesky, Reddit, and any other app that only needs a login to fully load all my data. And finally, there are the apps I don’t use, like Android Auto, which is not supported on my 2015 Subaru Crosstrek. There are even icon packs saved in the cloud in an act of pure madness!

Even though these apps only save a few megabytes of configuration data or login tokens (and, to be honest, most of them don’t store much more than that), I prefer to configure them again on a new device. I found that carrying luggage from an old Android device led to unpredictable problems on a new one anyway.