If you thought that our smartphones and tablets were bulletproof, then you might need to think again. Last year’s Stagefright incident – among other vulnerabilities and hacks – have taught us that these devices we rely upon so much aren’t totally infallible. For the most part though, Android is pretty secure, and the majority of bugs or issues we encounter can be fixed by turning our devices on and off, thus clearing the RAM and giving our devices a breather. For some ZenFone 2 users however, a scary problem has arrived, swallowing up precious storage space that users would otherwise have to use for their own files as well as apps and games.
As Reddit users have discovered, a log file has seemingly gone rogue and started ballooning in size, taking over storage elsewhere to accommodate for its ever-larger size. Log files are generated by pretty much every operating system out there – including your Windows 10 PC, that PS4 and your Android smartphone or tablet – and they’re often generated when something, somewhere goes wrong. Log files do tend to report more than they really ought to, but that’s not much of a problem as these files are supposed to be wiped every now and then, but in the case of the ZenFone 2’s “modemcrash” log (found in /data/logs/modemcrash) this isn’t happening. Instead, the log just keeps on getting bigger and bigger until there’s no room left on the device. Some users have been reporting as much as 7GB has been swallowed up by this rogue log file, and this is only on the increase for some.
In turns out the workaround right now is to root the ZenFone 2 and then delete the files found in that folder. The nature of Android is such that the platform will simply generate a new log file, there’s likely to be very little change to device behavior. This leaves a lot of users in a stick situation. Some might not have any idea on how to root a device, and other people might not be able to as some apps no longer work when a device is rooted. Hopefully, ASUS can get this bug fixed fairly soon, as it shouldn’t take them long to sent out a simple OTA that fixes whichever script responsible for deleting log files when they get full.