UPDATE: Nokia has released a firmware to address this problem.
There seems to be a major flaw in the WP8 OS in how it stores data. If you look under the phone's data storage, you'll notice one section labeled "Other". This section seems to randomly fill up over time, growing in size, and there's nothing much you can do about it. With my Lumia 920, there's 32GB of storage so this flaw doesn't hit me as hard as owners who have a WP8 smartphone with less storage. Still, my "Other" section has grown to 8GB so it's definitely a concern.
My phone data breaks down as follows : Music/Videos at 2GB, Photos at 70MB, Apps at 2GB. The OS takes 2GB so in total that's roughly 7GB which should give me around 25GB. However, my "Other" section takes up 8GB and my free space is listed at 15GB.
This 8GB of "Other" data is bewildering and no one seems to know what this data consists of. It seems to randomly grow, even without downloading new apps, etc. Many owners have tried different settings and there's even a newly released app called Shrink Storage which tries to clear some of this "Other" data.
I did free up a small amount of space (less than 1GB) by clearing out my Internet Explorer cache and adjusting some of my app settings so that it doesn't save a lot of back up data. Setting email sync to a lower amount and turning off SkyDrive's auto-upload seems to be suggested by others as well. Even trying the aforementioned Shrink Storage app, my "Other" data is currently at 8GB (it was around 7GB last week.)
It's pretty frustrating to buy a device with 32GB and have 1/4 of the storage taken by something that users have no control over. Some type of file management or explanation of what this "Other" data is is needed by Microsoft. But, it seems like this was a problem on the older WP7 phone and Zune as well. As much as I love WP8, this is a huge problem which doesn't bode well for the future success of this platform in my opinion.
The only true way to get rid of the "Other" data is a phone reset. You can join in on discussion about this problem over on WPCentral.
I too am a sad wp8 user and regret buying a Lumia 820 because of the issue described by you. I have literally no more space on the phone memory and I mainly have 2 large games installed and about 4 small ones. I have 2.58gb of storage in others and because this cancer still wants to grow most of my games either hang for even 1min at times and most of the time they close suddenly.
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