Today I decided to write about one “life hack” that helped me to save some money and prolonged the life of my REDMI phone which runs with MIUI 12.5.2 and Android 10. According to my mind it is very good budget phone which I bought couple of years ago and I am happy with the choice I made.
The issue was a limited amount of internal memory and amount of applications I have installed on the phone. During the time amount of applications I am using has increased and regular updates of applications started to fail due to the lack of disk space (internal memory). The workaround was to clear the application data and cleanup the system.
Such applications as Twitter or Facebook can have several hundreds of MB of cashed data which you can cleanup. This workaround works for some time until one has patients to perform it..
My phone had additional SD card with 64 GB of memory. I started to think why I am not able to install applications on that. During my research it appeared that there exist applications on Google Play which allow to migrate applications installed on your phone to your SD card.
I tried to install those application, but it appeared that they need your Android device to be rooted. Rooting of Android device means to disable a layer of system protection and work with the highest privileges. There exist applications allowing to root the Android device, but this was not the right path to follow in my case. My Android device was so up to date that one of the most popular rooting applications was not able to root it. So i decided to continue my research.
After further reading it appeared that since Android 10, many companies making Android phones started to disable the feature which is called “adoptable storage”. This feature was disabled on my phone as well. Luckily there is a way to enable it, because it allows to format your SD card as phone’s internal storage which was working on many phones before Android 10 by default. In that case phone’s internal storage is logically increased by amount of space on your SD card which you allocate for that purpose.
This is what I found on the internet for “MIUI” versions older than mine, but I can confirm it works on mine as well without any issues for two weeks already.
All the next steps you should continue only if you accept that there could be a risk to loose the data and it is recommended to create a valid backup of your phone first.
Necessary equipment:
- Computer (I used one with Windows 10);
- Phone running Android 6 (or above);
- Fast microSD card (at least UHS class 1 recommended);
- Backup – your SD card will be formatted;
- Enable developer options on your phone (in settings -> about phone -> tap “MIUI Version” 7 times);
- Enable „Stay awake“;
- Enable „USB debugging“;
- Disable „MIUI optimization“;
I followed suggestions I found on the internet and the process was very similar to it in my case too. I used mixed mode 50, which divided my SD card one half for internal storage and another for external.
Download and install „ADB and fastboot“ on your computer. Connect your phone via USB. This is not the rooting of your phone, but connecting to it through official interface and adjusting non-default system settings. After system settings are adjusted you can format your SD card as internal storage.
Run a command window (as administrator) and use the following commands:
adb shell
sm set-force-adoptable true
sm list-disks
You are going to see a result like disk:179,64.
sm partition disk:xxx,xx private/mixed xx
This is formating your SD card, change xxx,xx according to prior result e.g. 179,64. Use private if you want to use the whole SD card as adoptable storage. Use mixed xx if you still want a specific percentage of the SD card formatted as “portable” storage e.g. mixed 60 (-> 40 percent adoptable storage). Check success on your phone (setting -> storage).
sm list-volumes
You are going to see a result like private:179,67 mounted fb705131-c6a0-4e3a-959b-605a65334c8c
pm move-primary-storage xxxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx
migrate data to adoptable storage, change xxxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx
According to prior result e.g. fb705131-c6a0-4e3a-959b-605a65334c8c
check process on your phone („Moving data“ in the status bar).
Process worked for me as described. In my case I tried it as otherwise I would have to buy new phone to be able to continue to use applications I use. Data migration in this case means that applications that support “adoptable storage” feature are migrated to SD card and cache the data there too. System stays to run on device’s original internal storage. So you manage to move some part of your data to SD card which depends on what type of applications you use. In my case I can continue to use the phone.
Sometimes I notice that very good quality videos are glitching due to the fact that SD card is slower than internal memory, but those cases are rare enough to not pay attention to it.
From security perspective Android 10 saves all the data on internal storage as encrypted which means that data on SD card could be used only on this phone.
In case you are okay with all the risks and brave enough to try it out, just go ahead!!
Kastanis 24x7x365 