Xiaomi Redmi 9: What is the Other in Memory and How to Make Space

Owners of budget and mid-budget smartphones often face an unpleasant situation when internal storage is overflowing and standard methods do not work. Especially relevant question for the Xiaomi Redmi 9 model, which has a limited amount of internal memory in the basic versions. The user goes into the settings, sees that 20 or even 30 gigabytes occupies a mysterious section designated as “Other”, which causes confusion and anxiety, because it seems that no heavy files have been downloaded, and space disappears before his eyes.

The Other is a system container in which MIUI puts data that doesn’t fit into standard categories like Photos, Videos, or Applications, which includes messenger caches, remnants of remote programs, temporary update files, and system logs. Cleaning up this section requires caution, because mindless deletion can lead to unstable device operation or loss of important correspondence. In this article, we will discuss in detail what this volume consists of and how to safely return gigabytes of free space.

It's important to understand that Android's space-counting algorithms aren't always perfect. Sometimes the system doesn't have time to recalculate the space left after deleting a large file or deleting an application. So the first step should always be to simply restart the device, which allows the system to update the indexing of the files. However, if the situation hasn't changed after the reboot and "Other" still occupies a significant portion of the disk, you need to move on to a deeper analysis of the content.

Anatomy of the "Other" section on MIUI

To effectively combat space shortages, you need to understand the enemy in person. On the MIUI shell installed on Redmi 9, the category “Other” is formed from many disparate sources. First of all, it is the cache of applications that do not feel necessary to clean their temporary files automatically. Social networks, browsers and streaming services accumulate gigabytes of data that are not formally part of the application itself, but occupy a place in the general pool of “Other”.

The second important component is the remnants of remote applications, where when you delete a game or program through a standard interface, some configuration files or downloaded resources may remain in memory, the system marks them as "unidentified" because communication with the parent application is lost, and sends them to the "Other" section, which also includes firmware updates that the system saved in case of rollback, and various log files that record errors in the program.

Special attention should be paid to multimedia files that have been corrupted or have a non-standard encoding format. If you downloaded a video file that the player cannot recognize, it will not get into the gallery, but will remain dead weight in memory. Hidden folders also often fall into this category, since the standard conductor by default ignores them when categorizing, but takes into account when calculating the amount of occupied.

Basic cleaning with built-in system facilities

Before you resort to sophisticated methods, use the standard optimization tools that are already built into your Redmi 9. The MIUI shell has a powerful enough built-in cleaner that can find and remove a significant amount of garbage. To begin, open the Security app (green zipper icon) and select Cleanup.

However, standard cleaning often only affects the surface cache. For more in-depth work, go to Settings → Memory. Here you will see a visualization of occupied space. Click on "Other" or "Other" if the system allows for detail, or use the "Clear" function in the recommendations section. Often, MIUI itself tells you which applications occupy the most space in this category.

💡

Use the Deep Cleanup feature in the Security app once a week to prevent junk files from accumulating in the Other section.

So after the system cleaner is running, it’s recommended to manually check the settings of the most “heavy” applications, especially for social networks, which tend to keep previews of images and videos in huge quantities.

Working with the cache of messengers and social networks

The majority of the “Other” section on modern smartphones is in messengers. Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber and Instagram store all the media files viewed in the device’s memory so that when you reopen the chat, pictures load instantly. Over time, this cache can grow to 5-10 gigabytes or more, occupying a place in the “Other” category, since the system does not always classify these files as “Photo” or “Video”.

To clean up Telegram, go to Settings → Data and Memory → Memory Use. Here you will see the Cache slider and the Clear Cache button. Deleting the cache in Telegram does not remove your correspondence and photos from the cloud — they will be re-uploaded if necessary. This is the safest way to free up gigabytes of space. Similar actions can be done on WhatsApp via the Settings → Data and Storage → Storage Management.

In Viber, the situation is a little more complicated, because the app is less willing to give up storage management. Here you can use the built-in cleaning function: More → Settings → Memory → Clear cache. If this does not help, you will have to delete the application and install again, pre-backup chats, as files can lie deep in the Android system folders.

• 📱 Telegram: Settings → Data and memory → Use of memory → Clear the cache.
• 💬 WhatsApp: Settings → Data and storage → Storage management → Select chat rooms → Clean up.
• 📞 Viber: More → Settings → Memory. → Clear the cache.
• 📸 Instagram: Settings → Account. → Use of data → Clear the cache (or reinstall the application).

Finding and Deleting Hidden and Residual Files

Sometimes, the Other is inflated by files that are left behind after deleting games or programs, or have been downloaded from the browser and forgotten. Third-party file managers such as Total Commander, Files by Google or X-plore are best used to find them. The standard MIUI Explorer can hide some system folders, so third-party software will be more efficient.

Notice the folders with the names of the remote applications, and often they remain in the root of the internal memory or in the folder. Android/data. It's also worth checking the Download and Bluetooth folder, and the files with the.apk extension that you've already used also take up space and can be classified as "Other.

Pay special attention to the Android/obb folder. It stores heavy game caches. If you delete a game but the folder with its name is still in obb, it keeps taking up space. Deleting those folders is safe if the relevant game has already been removed from the device. However, be careful not to delete the active game folders, otherwise they will stop running.

Using Developer Mode and ADB for Advanced

For users who are not afraid of technical manipulations, there is a way to clean through debugging. USB This method allows you to see and delete files that are hidden from the average user even in file managers. To do this, you need to activate the developer mode on Redmi 9 by clicking 7 times on the build number in the About Phone section, and then turn on Debugging by Phone. USB» in the menu Advanced settings → For developers.

By connecting your smartphone to your computer, you can use ADB AppControl or the command line to analyze disk space. The adb shell dumpsys diskstats command will show detailed partition usage statistics. This will reveal the processes that are hiding the data. However, this method requires caution: deleting system files can lead to a bootloop (cyclical reboot) of the device.

adb shell pm list packages -f | grep "name packet"

This command will help you find a specific package that could be the source of the problem.If you find an application that is not removed in the standard way and takes up a lot of space in the Other, you can try to remove it via ADB by the adb uninstall name packet command.This is especially useful for removing system debris or preinstalled Xiaomi applications that cannot be removed through settings.

💡

Using ADB gives you maximum control over the file system, but requires accuracy: removing critical system components will cause the smartphone to fail.

Radical measures: Resetting to factory settings

If none of the above methods helped reduce the volume of the Other partition and it continues to grow or occupy a critical volume (for example, half of all memory), it is possible that an indexing error occurred in the file system, in which case the most effective, albeit time-consuming way, is a complete reset to the factory settings (Hard Reset).

Before doing this, make sure to back up all your important data: contacts, photos, documents and notes. Reset will remove all the data from the device, returning it to a “store-like” state. After resetting and initial setup, the Other section usually takes up a minimum volume (2-4 GB), which is the norm for a MIUI system.

After a reset, you don't want to restore all applications from the backup "wholesale" immediately, but you should install them gradually, observing the memory behavior, and this will help identify the culprit if the problem was caused by a specific application with an error in the code that inflated the "Other" section again.

Prevention of memory overflow

To avoid the problem of crowded “Other” section on Redmi 9, you should follow a few simple rules of digital space hygiene: regularly check the storage and delete unnecessary files without waiting for critical filling. Use cloud services to store photos and videos by enabling the “Free space” function in Google Photos.

It is also recommended to disable auto-save media files in group chat messengers, where there is active content sharing, this will prevent the accumulation of thousands of unnecessary pictures and stickers that will end up in the “Other” section.

💡

Install the Warehouse widget on your desktop to always see the free space and react quickly to its reduction.

In conclusion, the “Other” section is not a virus or an error, but a feature of the Android file system and the MIUI shell. Proper cache management, regular cleaning of messengers and careful attention to the installed applications will keep your Redmi 9 memory in order and avoid the need to permanently delete important files.