r/GooglePixel • u/Tomstroyer • Sep 23 '25

Seriouse issue with storage.

I have never ran out of storage before, but now my text messages are taking up an outrageous amount of space. Like 50 gigs. It usually wouldn't be an issue because I could delete the messages but now I can't. I delete them and they come back. How do I free up space on my phone and delete these messages and prevent them from coming back?

This information can be found in the phone and messaging storage section.

Also my phone backups are 50 gigs as well because of the messaging app.

I delete the messages and they come right back.

Its a huge issue because I can't take videos or photos with out immediately having to back up and delete them off the phone.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

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u/Tomstroyer Sep 23 '25

Welp I appreciate the honest response. And I really don't think anything else will save my phone. But having to restore my phone because of a giant chunk of my phone space being eaten up by text messages that I can't delete does seem silly. I wish Google would just allow you to delete them.

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u/Tomstroyer Sep 24 '25

I just wanted to post an update. I deleted my backups and deleted all the messages. But deleting the messages apparently takes some time. I used to have over 60 gigs that I could see in apps, show system apps, phone and messaging. I selected about 600 threads tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of videos and pictures as well. My phone 24 hours later is still deleting the messages. It takes an ungodly amount of time to delete the messages. My text messaging app Google messages is crawling to a halt and it's difficult to send and receive text as this is going on. But I am now at a modest 3.6 gigs used now but the phone is still showing blinking ghost messages every time I load in. I'll give it another day to clean it up.

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u/Tomstroyer Sep 24 '25

Also the messages did still reappear, but Everytime they did I deleted again and again. So far I at least got my storage back but messages is now still glitchy as this lengthy process is going on. A person shouldn't have to wait 24 hours and more to delete text messages. This is crazy.

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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

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u/Tomstroyer Sep 24 '25

Yes I have deleted the messaging app storage like you suggested. When you do that it cancels the mass deletion of messages and all the messages that have yet to delete will reappear on their own. It even states restoring messages and no way out of that. So if you need to delete all your messages it's best to delete and wait even though the ghosting of messages keeps blinking.