Fire TV woes....gone(and be careful with other Amazon services)

My journey into home streaming started out for two reasons:

1. to see if I can get TV channels without being attached to a coax cable
2. to use some streaming services as I do subscribe to Amazon Prime.  I will focus on this today as it relates to Fire TV devices.

So awhile back i had purchased at least one FireTV stick(might be 1st gen, maybe 2nd) and now have two sticks but I also have a Fire TV box 2nd gen in the living room. To say it has been gathering dust is an understatement and quite frankly I gave up on Amazon devices.

The original intent was great.  I could watch Prime services, Watch TV Everywhere service from my cable provider(general kudos to SELCO, another day) for many app based channels, and a few other things including local media streaming via Kodi(I don't really use add-ons at this time).

Things worked great for some time.  Then one day I was looking at a second alternate backup method for my NAS and saw this great tool from Amazon called Cloud Drive.  I won't knock the product at this time BUT something weird did happen......

I chose to back up my photos, full knowing I'd hit the 5GB free limit, and I did.  It was nice to see it at least be useful.  The only problem:  The Fire TV devices started complaining of Critically Low Storage.  I tried various things and even stopped the Cloud Photos and removed all the photos from Cloud Drive.  Still low storage.  I basically left them and switched to a Xiaomi Mi Box(http://www.mi.com/en/mibox/) - a great Android TV(Marshmallow based soon to be Nougat and will be much better).  This also put a delay on getting rid of my cable box ability.

Other day I took a look at the FireTV as I KNOW others don't have this problem.  A coworker/friend practically swears by at least the box, not the stick. I reset to factory, only add Netflix(not logged in) and HDHomerun(didn't run it).  Sure enough after about 45 mins of just letting it sit there doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ......Critically Low Storage...queue the colorful language.

So I check out Amazon Cloud Photos area again.  Hmm there is trash...the old photos are still there. WHAT THE _ _ _ _!!!! I do put in case/ticket request into both Amazon device support and Cloud storage.  I then start attacking as much of the files as I can.  KEY: I think this is where the issue might be that I had a bunch of videos taken on the phone that was backed up in the photos area.  My suspicion is that these could not show up as thumbnails they just sync'd down to the device.  I proceed to delete as much as my patience allows.

Now i go back to the FireTV and do all the clear cache/clear data on the usual suspects(Appstore, Video, and Photos).  Sure enough it stays at about 4.3 gig free of 5.59.  

I let it sit for the day. NO LOW STORAGE MESSAGE!!! 

I then re-add all the key apps I wanted and now seems good!

I think I like FireTV again as it is the primary "cable box" in the living room.  Bye Bye Cable company provided cable box!