Hello,
I was browsing stuff in internal memory and I noticed a lot of folders. Excluding folders I created and apps created, wchich ones I MUST PRESERVE and cannot delete to get system running? Well, I asked because I like to keep it tidy and I guess less stuff in memory means faster phone. I use few apps that have "cleaning" options like RootAppDelete (it has Clean Junk option) and GoPowerMaster (system trash clean option). Does these clean all what is unnecessary or should I manually clean something from time to time?
Those folders could have been created by applications. If you deleted them, the folders stay there if the folders are empty and aren't system ones with a dot in front of them, you can delete them. In my opinion, the best way to clean the folders is manually
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I've noticed through the course of installing/uninstalling apps over time I have a lot of junk folders sitting around in my /mnt/sdcard/ directory.
Is it safe to delete folders specific to apps in that directory?
Example: I have a /mnt/sdcard/WebMD folder sitting out there even though I uninstalled it a week ago.
Another question is what folders should I not tamper with? (data, external_sd, LOST.DIR, tmp, etc)
Thanks all
Any folder named after an app you've uninstalled you can delete. As they will only contain either setting information about the app or things that have been downloaded by that app.
Every folder under mnt/sdcard can be deleted and the phone will still function fine. No system files are stored there.
Your pictures you've taken, documents, downloads, backups (titanium backup) would all be deleted. For the most part those will be in folders named obviously (titaniumbackup, dcim).
Majority of folders that are labeled with a period in front of them, for example ".example" would contain information specific to the app "example".
If in doubt rename the folder to anything else. If a program suddenly stops working right, rename it back. No issues, feel free to delete.
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Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks gr8hairy1
No, thank you for giving me something to do while my wife shopped.
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When I uninstall apps (normally via Titanium Backup, but also via Android System), the .apk gets deleted, but there is still a lot of Data / Files / Folders on the sdcard.
Is there anyway to automatically remove all these when uninstalling the Apps? Possibly through a third party uninstaller app?
Cheers
Stewart
You could try SD maid, it's really useful and it had helped me with that
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Alexmessy said:
You could try SD maid, it's really useful and it had helped me with that
Sent from my amazing Nexus 7 using xda developer's app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have (and use) SDMaid, but I still had to go and manually delete loads of files and folders earlier on today!
Should I be uninstalling apps using SDMaid somehow?
delete before hand
You might just have to suck it up and do so manually or delete data before uninstall.
Some folders just can't be automaticly matched to installed/uninstalled apps.
We will have to delete those by hand.
I have the same problem, when I uninstall HD games I always have to delete manually the folder.
I don't take it as a big problem, but sometimes you don't know where is the folder.
So now that I have a phone with an internal SD card, I am particularly worried about data, or what would happen if I can no longer take it off of a device. Previously an SD card could just be removed from a dead device, but not so now.
I'm using foldersync to mirror data, but I was wondering what were the essential folders to sync. I can figure out most of them, but I'm struggling with the Android folder in root. Is there any valuable information in here or is it all temporary and so not required to be backed up?
sshaikh said:
So now that I have a phone with an internal SD card, I am particularly worried about data, or what would happen if I can no longer take it off of a device. Previously an SD card could just be removed from a dead device, but not so now.
I'm using foldersync to mirror data, but I was wondering what were the essential folders to sync. I can figure out most of them, but I'm struggling with the Android folder in root. Is there any valuable information in here or is it all temporary and so not required to be backed up?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if you don't care about storage space and automation and you happen to use TotalCommander for PC, it has perfect "Synchronize Dirs" feature, with in my personal experience (after many tests of different solutions) wins every time due to high customisation, ease of use and option of binary comparison
You don't need to backup the Android folder. It's mostly just full of data files for certain apps. Like Google Maps saved map data, cached music from Google Music, game data, small preferences files for some apps etc. Nothing important. Even if you delete the contents of the whole Android folder, they'll be re-created on boot or when you run those apps next. Map data, Google music etc should be downloaded again manually. It's a waste of space to back it up as it can be 2GB or more sometimes. Generally, only backup your personal data like pictures, videos, music, downloads etc. Things which you've put there yourself. Also backup any folders of backup related apps like SMSBackup&Restore, Titanium Backup and recovery folder with nandroid backups. Personal files + backup app data is all you need to backup from the SD card. Everything else is insignificant and will be recreated anyway by the respective apps.
Thanks sashank, that's what I thought. It's a pain to backup because of the size and usage.
Looking at the docs however it seems apps can put whatever data they want there, including settings. So I guess this depends on the app itself and how well it behaves itself. I guess I will have to be discerning and backup individual files in the folder depending on how important the app is to me. Which sucks.
p107r0 said:
if you don't care about storage space and automation and you happen to use TotalCommander for PC, it has perfect "Synchronize Dirs" feature, with in my personal experience (after many tests of different solutions) wins every time due to high customisation, ease of use and option of binary comparison
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I'm using Foldersync to do this automatically already. I just didn't want to spend time and energy maintaining a backup of redundant cache data!
I would like to go through and completely clean out my phones storage. By that I mean deleting all the old files that uninstalled apps created, empty folders, and other things that most ROMs don't bother to remove. I realize that it isn't really necessary, and why ROM makers don't really do it. I just feel compelled to do it.
For example;
At root there is the DATA folder but also a DATA_1, DATA_2, and DATA_3 folder that are just empty. Are these folders necessary? If I were to delete them and some system process needed them would they just be recreated? There are a ton of other empty folders throughout the file system that I would love to just delete.
Speaking of the DATA folder, it contains a DATA folder... It's great that all these ROMs remove the bloatware but within this secondary DATA folder sits old files related to these removed apps. Can't these be safely deleted?
The default wallpaper is easy enough to find and delete, but where are the other wallpapers that come preloaded? Seems to me like there may be a ton of little files out there that could be deleted to add up to a decent amount of space.
I supposed what I am really asking is what the best resources out there are for determining what's really necessary and what's deletable. Googling random file names only gets you so far. Heh. Maybe I should just flash a ROM and forget it, but I am just too OCD!
Delete what you will. Anything needed will be recreated. Some apps might store stuff there, but all core system data is stored on the data partition.
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/data/data is a valid partition. Also, you aren't gaining anything by deleting the stock wallpapers, etc except space that you cannot use- they lie on a reserved partition that is a set size.
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How to prevent certain empty folders from being deleted by "clean & boost" apps.
As the title says! Usually I organize my files inside organized folders to look them up easily, so sometimes still there are important folders that stay empty or unused yet and I hate when they are already gone during a mass clean specially from Clean Master, so is there anything or specific technique can do the trick?
Thank you in advance & appreciate any help