Many modern smartphones now have large amounts of storage, but this isn’t necessarily the case for many budget phones, mid-tier, or older phones. This means you have to be careful of what and how much you save on your phone.
By default, Google only stores media messages sent in Duo and keeps them available for download for twenty-four hours. After this time period expires, the messages are deleted forever. To allow these messages to be available for longer, Duo automatically saves them to your device. While space on your device likely won’t be a problem immediately, having a communication app like Google Duo automatically saving media messages to your device can start to take up a lot of space really quickly.
While notes documents may not take up much space, photos, voice messages, and videos are media types that are notorious for taking up a lot of data and storage space.
How to Prevent Google Duo from Saving Files to Your Device
If you want to prevent Google Duo from automatically saving media messages to your device, you can do so through the settings. To open the settings, click on the cogwheel icon in the top-right corner.
Tip: If you’re on mobile, you can access the settings by tapping on the triple-dot icon in the top-right corner. Then tap “Settings.”
Once in the settings, click the slider labeled “Save messages” to the “Off” position. This will prevent Google Duo from automatically saving media files to your device. You will still be able to download media files that have not yet expired manually.
Tip: If you’re on mobile, tap on “Message settings,” then tap the “Save messages” slider to the “Off” position. The setting will be applied across all platforms, so you only need to disable it once.
Did this help? Let us know!