Another in Xiaomi storage: how to remove excess

Owners of Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO smartphones often face a mysterious phenomenon: the device’s memory fills up rapidly, even though the user has not downloaded heavy games or movies. In the system analyzer, this volume is marked as “Other”, and standard cleaning methods are often powerless here. This category combines heterogeneous data that the system cannot uniquely classify as applications, images or music.

Dealing with what’s behind this label is essential to the gadget’s normal operation. Internal memory overflow leads to MIUI brakes, bugs when installing updates, and even spontaneous reboots. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the Other folder and suggest proven methods for cleaning it safely.

Android on the MIUI shell has its own specifics of storing temporary files. Often users do not even know how much space is occupied by debugging logs, streaming services cache or remnants of remote applications. Understanding the structure of the file system will help you return gigabytes of free space without losing important data.

What is hidden in the category "Other"

The Other category is a kind of digital warehouse of forgotten things, where the system sends all files that do not meet the standard classification criteria, the bulk of which is usually cached data from social networks and messengers that Telegram or WhatsApp saves for quick download.

It can also contain the installation packages left over from the system update and logs of various services, and sometimes the folder is inflated by the incorrect operation of the file system, when deleted files formally disappear, but the space they occupy is not marked as free.

It's important to understand that without a deep analysis, you can't tell exactly what's going on in your case, but statistics show that the most common culprits are:

• 📂 App and browser cache that hasn’t been cleaned in years.
• 📦 Remnants of remote games and programs (data folders).
• 🗑️ System logs and error reports that take up gigabytes.
• 💾 Temporary update files MIUI, which did not automatically disappear.

⚠️ Warning: Before you start cleaning, make sure that there are no important documents in the Other folder that you accidentally moved to hidden directories.Blindly deleting system files can cause crashes.

Content analysis is best done in stages, starting with the safest methods, and one should not immediately resort to radical measures such as a complete reset if one can do with software cleaning.

Use of built-in storage analyzer

The first step that should be taken by the owner of Xiaomi is the use of standard tools of the system. MIUI It has a fairly advanced analyzer that allows you to see the memory distribution in more detail than the standard settings menu. → Memory.

Here you'll see a color diagram where the "Other" category is highlighted in a separate color, and clicking on it will prompt you to clear the cache, but often that's not enough. A deeper analysis is available through the Security app, which is pre-installed on all the brand's devices.

In the Security app, select the Cleanup section, and the system scans the device and suggests removing debris, but to get to hidden files, you need to click on the Deep Cleanup icon or a similar option in the top menu, and you can find large files that the system didn't previously consider.

Don’t ignore the App Cache section inside the analyzer, which is often where gigabytes of data from YouTube, Spotify, or Netflix are hidden, which are not formally part of the app but are placed in the Other category.

Cleaning through file manager and hidden folders

For more point-based work, you'll need access to the file system. Xiaomi's standard Explorer lets you see hidden folders if you turn on the appropriate option. Click on three dots in the corner of the screen and select Settings → Show hidden files.

Now, look at the root directory and the Android folder, which contains the data and obb subfolders that store game and application data, and removing the contents of these active folders will cause you to lose game progress or reset your settings, so be careful.

Special attention should be paid to folders with the names of remote applications. If you have ever installed a game and then deleted it, its tails often remain here. MIUI → debug_log — Logs of debugging can accumulate here.

Another place where forgotten files hide is the Download directory and the root of internal memory. APK, PDF-documents or archives are forgotten and the system lists them as “Other” because it cannot automatically determine the type of content.

Delete residual files after deleted applications

Standard Android app removal often leaves a trail of junk, which can be configuration files, temporary data, or media files created by the program, and over time, such residues accumulate in large quantities.

To find them, search the file system. Type.log or.tmp. These files are non-payloadable and can be easily deleted. Also look for folders with names of apps you know that are no longer on the menu.

A special case is messengers. Telegram, for example, stores all the photos and videos viewed in a cache that inflates the category “Other”. Inside the application itself, in the data and memory settings → Using memory, you can clear the cache without losing correspondence.

Regularly reviewing installed programs helps keep the system clean, and if you rarely use an application, consider whether to keep it permanently installed, or use the web version of the service.

Working with debugging logs and system debris

One of the specific problems with Xiaomi devices is the accumulation of debugging logs, which are technical records of how the system works, which developers need to find bugs, which the average user does not need, but can take up from 1 to 10 GB of memory.

To turn off their generation or clear existing ones, go to Settings → About Phone. Here you need to quickly click on the MIUI version number 7 times to activate the developer menu. Then go back to the settings menu, find Advanced Settings → For developers.

In this menu, find logging items, depending on the firmware version, they can be called logging or MIUI Debug. Turn off these features. You can use the ADB command to clean up the garbage you've already accumulated, but that requires a PC connection.

The.thumbnails files deserve a special attention, and these are thumbnails of your photos that the gallery creates for quick viewing, and with a lot of photos, this folder can grow to an incredible size, and you can clean it, but the gallery will recreate it the next time you run it.

⚠️ Note: Do not delete files with the.obb extension for games you continue to play, which will result in the need to re-download gigabytes of data when you start the game.

Radical methods: resetting and flashing

If none of the soft methods helped to free up space, and the Other category continues to occupy an absurd volume (for example, 20-30 GB on a 64 GB device), there may have been a file system error, in which case only a complete reset helps.

Before performing this procedure, be sure to back up all important data to the Mi Cloud cloud or computer. Reset will delete absolutely all data from the internal drive.

To perform the reset, go to Settings → About Phone → Reset. Select “Erase All Data.” This process will return the phone to factory status, and the “Other” category will disappear as the file system will be relabeled.

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Before you reset completely, try renaming the folder "Other" through the computer file manager if you have root rights, sometimes forcing the system to recalculate the indexes.

The alternative is to flash the device through Recovery mode, a more complex method that requires a firmware file and Fastboot skills, but it ensures that all system partitions are clear of errors.

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A complete reset is the only guaranteed solution if the Other accumulation error is caused by a file system failure rather than real files.

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