Archive your App World downloads to free up memory

How many apps do you have installed on your BlackBerry? That’s not a question designed to find out how hardcore a user you are. Instead, it’s to gauge how close you are to filling your device memory. While your BlackBerry might tell you that it have multiple gigabytes of free space, that considers the memory card. But you can’t store applications on and run them from an SD card. They have to be present in the device memory, which currently stands at 256MB for the most recent models. What to do, then, if you run out of space? You could use Aerize Card Loader, but if you get most of your apps from BlackBerry App World, you can also take advantage of their free archiving service. To archive your App World downloads you’ll need an SD card, obviously with enough free space to store the applications. You’ll also need to identify applications you don’t frequently use. Once you archive the application you can no longer run it. If you need it again, you can go back into App World and restore it. Once you open App World, navigate to My World, where you’ll see a list of the applications you’ve downloaded. Scroll to the target app, click the Menu button, and select Archive. Once you confirm, App World will move the device from your internal memory to the SD card, and will place a green arrow with the word “Archived” next to the app icon. It will also prompt you to reboot. I recommend denying this until you’ve archived all of your applications, opting to reboot after the final one, lest you reboot with each app archive. To restore an application you can go to the inactive application icon and click on it. You do need a wireless connection in order to restore an application. You can use this process as much as the situation dictates, so in theory you could do it even with frequently used applications. However, the time to archive and restore is not trivial, so you probably don’t want to waste all that time. With a tip of the hat to Al Sacco.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.