New Delhi, Mar 27 (IANS): With increasing quality and consequently the size of the content, storage has become a problem for smartphone users in India with 29 per cent running out of space at least once a week and 62 per cent at least every three months, a new research said on Monday.

According to a country-wide independent consumer research by flash storage solutions provider SanDisk, almost two thirds (65 per cent) have also regretted deleting precious photos or videos to free up storage space.

Nearly 36 per cent of Indians said that they would delete a photo of themselves instead of friends, pets or family.

"Our research really highlights the pressure that people are under to choose what they want to keep on mobile handsets," Khalid Wani, Director - Channel Sales, Western Digital (India) at SanDisk, said in a statement.

"With the average person in India taking 31 photos and 14 videos a week on their smartphone, and the size of digital images and video increasing rapidly, devices soon fill up," Wani added.

The research also found that 46 per cent of people have to delete files or data from their main handsets in order to free up space at least once a week, while 77 per cent do this at least once a month.

In addition to the challenges around storage, the research also looked at security, with 67 per cent of respondents being fairly worried or very worried that the files and data on their smartphone are at risk of theft or loss through product malfunction.

Almost 64 per cent said they had lost a precious photo or video from their smartphone as a result of files not being backed up.

"Despite this, less than half (46 per cent) of Indian people manually back up their data and files from the main handset once a week, six per cent never back up files at all, excluding automatic backups and data synchs," the research found.