Owners of Xiaomi, Redmi and Poco smartphones often face an unpleasant situation: the device begins to signal a lack of space, although there are few photos, and only the most necessary applications are installed. A detailed analysis of the storage reveals that the lion’s share is taken by the mysterious category “Other” (or “Other”), which can reach tens of gigabytes. This is a “black hole” where the system puts the cache of applications, remnants of remote programs, error logs and temporary files that were not correctly deleted.
Ignoring internal memory overflows is absolutely impossible, as it leads to slowdowns, application crashes and the inability to update the system. In this article, we will discuss safe and effective ways to clean this partition without damaging personal data, you will learn how to find hidden sources of garbage and prevent their accumulation in the future.
The nature of the “Other” section on Xiaomi
The MIUI or HyperOS “Other” category is the system container for all files that the Android operating system cannot uniquely classify as images, videos, music or documents. The main source of growth of this section is the app cache. Social networks, messengers and browsers store a huge amount of temporary data to speed up work, but rarely delete them on their own.
Another reason is residual files after deleting programs: When a user deletes an application in the standard way, folders with its settings and temporary data often remain dead in system directories, and crash logs, firmware update files that did not automatically delete, and remote game databases fall into this category.
⚠️ Warning: Before deep memory cleaning, always back up important data. Although the methods described below are safe, accidental deletion of a system file can lead to unstable software operation.
Understanding the storage structure helps avoid panic. Files in the Other section are not viruses, they are system workflows. However, when they exceed reasonable limits (for example, 10-15 GB on a device with a total memory of 64 GB), user intervention is required. Analysis shows that up to 40% of the space in this category can be occupied by data from messengers such as Telegram or WhatsApp.
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The Other section is not a system error, but a cache and temporary files that can be safely removed manually.
Basic cleaning through built-in MIUI and HyperOS
The first step should always be to use regular optimization tools. Xiaomi is embedding a powerful security app into its devices that can find and remove most of the garbage. To start the process, you need to open the application and select the Cleanup item. The system will scan and suggest removing cache files, installer packages and advertising debris.
But standard cleaning often doesn't affect the deep cache of heavy applications. For more detailed work, go to Settings → Memory. Here's a detailed diagram of the space distribution. Clicking on the "Other" or "Other" category, you can see a list of the apps that take up the most space, and it often turns out that they generate the bulk of the "junk."
An effective method is to clear specific application data through the control menu. Go to Settings → Apps → All applications, select a “heavy” application (for example, YouTube or TikTok) and click Memory. There is a “Clear Cache” button available. It is important not to confuse it with the “Clean Everything” button, since the latter will reset the application to the factory settings, removing your logins and saves.
☑️ Basic memory cleanup
Using a Storage Analyzer to Find Hidden Files
If standard methods have not significantly reduced the size of the Other partition, you need to connect heavy artillery, specialized disk analyzers. The standard MIUI file manager often hides real paths to files. You can use proven utilities from Google Play, for example, Files by Google or DiskUsage.
DiskUsage visualizes a smartphone's memory as a block map, and the larger the block on the screen, the more space it takes up, and it instantly finds hidden folders that inflated the Other section, often with folders with names like.temp, log, or streaming cache that don't clear automatically.
You can see a folder with an obscure name that takes 2 GB. Before you delete it, you should check the contents. If you have files with the.jpg or.mp4 extension inside that you don't recognize, it's probably a messenger cache. Deleting those folders is safe for the system to work, but it can clear your chat history.
Why do files return after deletion?
Cleaning messengers: Telegram, WhatsApp and Viber
The leaders in filling the category “Other” invariably become messengers. Telegram, for example, by default caches all the photos and videos viewed so that they are downloaded instantly when reopened. Over time, this cache can grow to 5-10 GB or more, showing in the system as “Other”, you need to clean up inside the application itself.
In Telegram, you should go to Settings → Data and Memory → Memory Use. You should click on “Clear Telegram cache.” It is recommended to also turn on the “Media Auto Delete” slider, setting a period of, for example, 3 days or 1 week. This will prevent the accumulation of garbage in the future. Similar actions are available on WhatsApp (Settings → Data and Storage → Storage Management) and Viber.
It's important to understand the difference between deleting a chat and clearing a cache. Deleting a correspondence will free up space, but you'll lose your message history. Clearing the cache will only delete the downloaded media from your phone's memory, but they will remain in the cloud or be re-uploaded when you view it. Clearing the media cache is critical for the "Other" section.
- 📱 Telegram: Settings → Data and memory → Use of memory → Clear the cache.
- 💬 WhatsApp: Settings → Data and storage → Storage management → Choose Chats or All Media».
- 📞 Viber: Additional → Settings → Memory. → Clear the cache.
- 🗑️ Facebook Messenger: Settings → Media and files → Delete all data (within the application).
⚠️ Attention: In messengers, the Clear Data function (not cache!) will delete the entire history of correspondence without the possibility of recovery».
Radical methods: resetting and flashing
If neither cleaning the cache nor deleting the apps helps, and the Other partition continues to take up an abnormally large amount of space (e.g., more than 20 GB on an empty phone), it is possible that the file system is corrupted or has accumulated a lot of system errors, in which case the most effective, though time-consuming, method is a full reset to factory settings (Hard Reset).
Before performing this procedure, you need to make a full backup of all important data to your computer or to the Xiaomi Cloud / Google Drive cloud. Reset will delete absolutely everything: contacts, photos, apps and settings. After reset, the Other section is usually reduced to a minimum system 1-2 GB.
To perform the reset, go to Settings → About Phone → Settings Reset → Erase all data. The device will reboot and begin the cleaning process. An alternative, more sophisticated method is to flash the device through the computer using the Mi Flash Tool utility and selecting the Clean All mode, which is guaranteed to eliminate any software errors of garbage accumulation.
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After resetting your phone, do not restore all applications from backup at once; install only the ones you need to avoid returning the old junk cache.
Table: Comparison of memory cleaning methods
For the convenience of choosing the best way to solve the problem, we will give a comparative table of methods, which will help to assess the risks and effectiveness of each approach depending on your situation and level of technical training.
| Cleaning method | Efficiency | Risk of data loss | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard cleaning ("Safety") | Low (up to 1GB) | No. | Minimum |
| Cleaning the app cache manually | Medium (2-5 GB) | No (only cache) | Low. |
| DiskUsage (diskUsage) | High (depending on the user) | Medium (can be removed extra) | Medium |
| Full reset (Hard Reset) | Maximum (up to 99%) | Tall (removes everything) | Tall. |
Prevention: How to prevent the growth of the “Other”
To prevent the problem from returning regularly, you need to introduce the habit of periodic maintenance of the smartphone. the MIUI-based Android operating system is prone to accumulating temporary files if not helped. Regularly, at least once a month, manually cleaning the cache of heavy applications (video, social networks) works wonders.
It's also important to turn off automatic status saving in instant messengers and limit autoplay of videos on social networks, which not only traffic, but also clog memory with invisible files, and use cloud storage for photos and videos will keep local memory free.
Watch for system updates. Xiaomi engineers periodically release patches that fix memory management errors. If you notice that the Other section started to grow faster after the firmware update, there may be a bug in the new version that should be reported to the community forum.