So whenever I change roms, or re-root my phone, I tend to have to reinstall all my programs since I had a terrible experience with Titanium. Regardless, not a huge deal since I tend to enjoy trying new apps and what not. But...I realized that a ton of crap is left on my sd card. Is there a "safe" way to go around and cleaning that crap up without fearing that it'll affect my phone, or the apps that are installed? Any suggestions on how to maintain the "cleanliness" of my sd card? Same goes for internal storage as well...
Try SDmaid it's in the market free. It will clean out any left over files that have no programs/apps associated to them. I use it all the time.
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Good eveneing dear community
I realize that FroYo was a major leap forward for quite a few of us, especially those limited in phone storage (I'm talking about Nexus One and Desire owners in particular). However, I think there is something seriously wrong with those App2SD capabilities.
I recently got the impression that moving applications to SD storage is killing SD cards too fast. Just after the first official FroYo OTA, I discovered and used the posibility to force move applications to SD storage using ADB shell. The result was that virtually any application could be moved out of the phone's internal storage. So far, so good.
But considering that we get updates from the market every few hours, SD cards are under much more pressure now than they were designed to, aren't they? I'm saying this, because in the exact same configuration I mentioned above, my cards keep dying. Before the OTA, I bought an expensive class 10 Kingston microSDHC card and the performance was indeed remarkable. However, after the OTA and my ADB stunt, my card would get mounted as read-only every few days now. In addition to that, I can't run any applications on the card anymore and the entire system becomes unstable. Unmounting the card using the Android system settings is not possible and neither is formatting. Instead, my phone would sometimes reboot. At first I thought this was a problem with my Kingston SD.
When I ran some tests and did the same things with the official 4 GB card that shipped with my phone as well as with another 8 GB card that came with an older Nokia phone of mine I realized that it wasn't a problem specific to my Kingston card. All of them showed the exact same behavior. This is not just annoying, it also causes data loss, which in my case is unnacceptable!
Has anybody experienced the same? Is this a problem of Android 2.2 or is it just the way microSDHC works? What, besides mounting said damaged cards in a Laptop in attempt fix, can we do about it?
Thank you for any suggestions.
My next phone must have at least 8 GB of internal storage...
Define "dying".
If by dying you mean Android reports there's something wrong with your card, then more likely the problem is software-related rather than the SD being overused.
I got the "your card is fubar" message from my phone but it was as a result of me damaging the file system with a sketchy file manager app. I put it in my computer, did a scandisk. This found the problem, fixed it, I put it back in my phone, voila, perfect again.
Or your problem might be related to the method you're forcibly moving the apps to your SD card. Since you're doing it with ADB rather than through the operating system itself, it's possible apps are corrupting your card's file system as a result of not realizing where they're located. Just a guess.
In any case, SD cards don't (and won't) die from the sort of use you're describing. What might be harmful is storing frequently-used cache on your SD card, but that's not something that you're doing.
Keep in mind that SD cards are intended to be used in cameras, camcorders, etc, and these things write a lot more frequently and aggressively to the card than a little app storage here and there.
I'm not exactly an expert but I'm definitely what I'd call an enthusiast, and let me tell you with certainty: you really have nothing to worry about. Your problem is most likely a software (or related file system issue) or else caused by a one-in-a-thousand random hardware defect. Android, or more specifically, app to SD, isn't a problem.
Maybe you've heard of solid state drives for computers, these are becoming more common. I use one in fact. They operate using technology similar to SD card storage and if ANYTHING was going to stress these things, it would be running a whole computer off them, temp files and all.
Finally, if you're still a little afraid, let me remind you that in fact your phone itself uses the same kind of flash storage as an SD card. Every phone, MP3 player, and similar device does. So in a sense, if wearing out your storage is a concern for you, isn't it better to wear out a replaceable SD card than your phone's irreplaceable internal storage?
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So now assuming you trust me that there's nothing to worry about, I would suggest you stop forcibly moving apps to your SD card as a possible long-term solution. If you stop getting card problems, you know what the problem was. Since this means you'll run low on storage, I'd then suggest you install a custom OS that allows you to force-move apps from within Android itself, such as Cyanogenmod.
I've been using this mod since it came out and have had no problems. As mentioned above it must be software related to your phone.
Sent from my HTC Desire
Thank you so much for calming me down. I just got the impression that my cards are toast. However, as long as there is a possibility to fix this using my laptop, I'm on the good side.
I disabled that ADB stunt, let's look what the next few days bring.
Just an idea: if your phone (or the sd slot, for that matter) would be somehow messed up, wouldn't that show the same symptoms? It would even explain why _every_ card acts that way. Maybe it's a bad contact in the slot, who knows...
got myself a class 10 16gb card and was hoping to use app2sd to place all my junk onto the card. but i notice it was only moving things to /sdcard which is still the internal memory...
has anyone figured out a way around this or know of the limitations?
There are no limitations. There's 16 freaking gigs already there. Use the new sd card for music or something.
The only reason I have an sdcard in mine is for mirroring, in case something happens to the device. Then I'll still have all of my crap backed up. Or in case my sdcard takes a dump, like it did two weeks ago.
I can just copy over the data if need be.
Sunsparc said:
The only reason I have an sdcard in mine is for mirroring, in case something happens to the device. Then I'll still have all of my crap backed up. Or in case my sdcard takes a dump, like it did two weeks ago.
I can just copy over the data if need be.
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But you have to manually back your data up to the scarf, don't you?
I hate the thought of lodging all my data because there is no way to get to it if my phone bricks for any reason.
Sent from my SPH-D710 using XDA App
Why don't you just use Titanium Backup to backup the apps? A2SD will not 'backup' your apps. It just moves part of the app to the FAT portion of your sdcard. A2EXT will move the entire app but why in the world anyone would need to use that with any modern high end phone is beyond me.
KCRic said:
Why don't you just use Titanium Backup to backup the apps? A2SD will not 'backup' your apps. It just moves part of the app to the FAT portion of your sdcard. A2EXT will move the entire app but why in the world anyone would need to use that with any modern high end phone is beyond me.
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Agreed - Put your music and videos, maybe even your photos, on your External SD (I moved all of my iTunes music/video/podcast library there and sync with iSyncr).
Leave everything else on your internal SD. It's huge. Use Titanium to backup, and if you have a dropbox account, you'll get a 'remote' backup thrown in to boot.
I have a similar problem . I made a thread about it: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1414115
I have seen several conflicting threads on this, but no clear solution. Basically, the problem I have is that if I move more than 50 or so apps to my SD card (I have heard others complain about the problem manifesting at around 70 apps) a race condition occurs during the card scan, which since it doesn't complete before a timeout, causes the phone to soft reset (basically reload just the top level OS above the continuously running kernel). These resets then continue to occur at semi-random intervals, such as every time you try to access the memory card. So far, the only fix I have is to delete apps from the SD card, and it really doesn't matter which ones they are, only that above a certain number, the system becomes unstable, and I presume it is because the system cannot index all of the apps fast enough. I can't believe the stupid Samsung engineers never thought of fixing this.
Anyway, I am running a stock, rooted kernel, stock ROM, but the internal memory is nearly full with all of the large applications that for whatever reason cannot be moved to SD. Does anybody have any viable options?
I have heard of some people using app2SD. I have heard of others remapping their external storage to sd_card with the USB storage mapped to sd_card/external_sd. I tried replacing my memory card (Sandisk, 16GB, Class 2) with a brand new, out of box (Sandisk, 16GB, Class 6), and I am still limited to the same number of installed apps. I'm not sure, but I think the number of active widgets on the desktop may also be a contributing factor (all of my widgets are stored to internal memory).
I have about 180 apps on my phone and have never run out of room; what do you have on there that takes up so much space?
if its data, then move that to an external sd...
wase4711 said:
I have about 180 apps on my phone and have never run out of room; what do you have on there that takes up so much space?
if its data, then move that to an external sd...
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Well, first of all, I've never removed the Sprint bloatware. I also have the Amazon App store and (on the assumption that my SD card still has gigabytes of storage) pretty indiscriminantly "purchase" and install Amazon's free app of the day, plus all the other apps I've gotten from Google Play. By latest count, it is around 360 apps, and that was after I deleted several large apps that for some horrible reason couldn't be moved to the SD card, including PoolBar (50MB+), Android Phrase Book (26 MB+), some other tennis game I got from Amazon (20+MB), none of which gave you the option of offloaded to SD. About 110 of the apps were games, 25 utilities, 24 media apps, 20 social networking apps, 19 shopping apps, 17 travel apps, 16 PIM apps, 11 photo manipulation tools, 11 internet apps, 8 maps and navigation, etc.
Complicating matters, Android has a /data/data directory which has soft links to all the applications installed on your system, regardless of whether they are installed on internal or external memory, and each link must be the filesystem minimum 4KBs each. Looking at root explorer, I see that this directory alone is over 300MBs of internal storage.
well, the answer to your problem is easy; get rid of 1/2 the **** on your phone that you never use, and you will be fine!
if you don't use it every day or at least once a week, its gotta go
jatoghia said:
Well, first of all, I've never removed the Sprint bloatware. I also have the Amazon App store and (on the assumption that my SD card still has gigabytes of storage) pretty indiscriminantly "purchase" and install Amazon's free app of the day, plus all the other apps I've gotten from Google Play. By latest count, it is around 360 apps, and that was after I deleted several large apps that for some horrible reason couldn't be moved to the SD card, including PoolBar (50MB+), Android Phrase Book (26 MB+), some other tennis game I got from Amazon (20+MB), none of which gave you the option of offloaded to SD. About 110 of the apps were games, 25 utilities, 24 media apps, 20 social networking apps, 19 shopping apps, 17 travel apps, 16 PIM apps, 11 photo manipulation tools, 11 internet apps, 8 maps and navigation, etc.
Complicating matters, Android has a /data/data directory which has soft links to all the applications installed on your system, regardless of whether they are installed on internal or external memory, and each link must be the filesystem minimum 4KBs each. Looking at root explorer, I see that this directory alone is over 300MBs of internal storage.
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I can't imagine ever installing that many apps, but whatever... If it we me, I would start by trimming off anything you "know" you have never or will never use. After that I would concentrate on putting the biggest apps on the SD card and the rest on the internal. I have 122 apps installed on internal only with much room to spare and I am sure there are things I just will never use. LOL
CyberpodS2 said:
I can't imagine ever installing that many apps, but whatever... If it we me, I would start by trimming off anything you "know" you have never or will never use. After that I would concentrate on putting the biggest apps on the SD card and the rest on the internal. I have 122 apps installed on internal only with much room to spare and I am sure there are things I just will never use. LOL
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It really isn't hard to use a bunch of apps, particularly with all the websites, including this one, that have their own viewer apps (or Wikipedia, urban dictionary, etc.). Anyway, I have all my apps in folders so it still only requires 2 pages of apps. I think it is stupid that they designed the operating system so that you would be app limited, even with an unlimited amount of storage via the sd card slot. I hope this is one feature they fixed in ICS. A much better strategy for exploiting the multilevel memory architecture would have been to allow the user to install ALL nonessential apps to the SD card by default, eliminating the need for soft links in internal storage, and then use the internal storage as a nonvolatile app cache with an LRU replacement policy. This would then give the most commonly used apps the performance benefit of running from internal storage without the user having to go moving crap around. It would actually be very similar to what Intel is now doing with solid-state drives as a hard disk cache with the new Z68 chipset.
Hey
I just bought a new HTC One V and i want apps to be installed on my sd card and i cant(there is a very low percentage of apps that can what should i do??)My phone is not rooted and i am not willing to root it too.Please help me out
Are you running out of storage for apps? It should be totally unnecessary to do this. You have 1GB of space to use. Storing apps to the SD card only slows them down.
@CafeKampuchia: really i didn't know that but i want to shift apps to sd card so that the phone is fast
Then don't move them. Moving apps to the SD card may have made older devices faster, but not this one. It's got plenty of fast memory for apps.
I suggest you leave apps on the device unless you're running out of memory, which basically isn't going to happen until you spend a couple hours randomly downloading large apps from Google Play.
Hi guys, I posted this over at android central but I also wanted to post here to get as much help as possible.
"Guys,quick question. I haven't been on stock rom for a long while but I kind of missed using the S-pen and someone suggested a stock-based custom 4.3 rom that I actually like so I've stuck with it for the time being. Now, I never really bothered with move to SD mods because I've learned to use my internal and external memory more efficiently but I figured if it's feature in TW I might as well take advantage since I'll be traveling abroad for two months come Dec. Well I've noticed that even after the apps are "moved" to the SD card, I don't regain any usable space on my internal card. I downloaded a game that's 779MB. My internal reduced from 3GB to 2.2GB. Okay. So I moved the game to my SD card. It moved 778MB to the SD card and 656KB remained on my phone. However, my internal only went from 2.2GB to 2.3GB. What?
I went back and calculated all the games I moved over and I've barely recovered more than 500MB for close to 30 games/apps moved to SD. All the games are still taking up close to their entire size in internal memory. Then what's the point? I have a 64GB class 10 card. Can someone enlighten me on what the hell is going on? I normally would just shrug of when things fail this like this but actually being tempted to use it and then finding it broken is really irritating."
"Also, I should point out that none of the storage is taken up by game data. Usually when I finish game and haven't touched it for a while I just clear data and uninstall. However, I will be traveling with a organization that specializes in providing AIDS/HIV care and education to developing nations, so I will going to multiple small villages across five countries. I'm not counting on having any kind of service for a good majority of the time so I thought "great" I'll take advantage of this new feature and download every game I've ever bought so I have something to occupy my time during the plane/train rides. I haven't downloaded any games on my phone since I got the N7 so every game currently on my phone is newly downloaded and never opened, so, no game data."
Any help would be much appreciated.
Analyss14 said:
Hi guys, I posted this over at android central but I also wanted to post here to get as much help as possible.
"Guys,quick question. I haven't been on stock rom for a long while but I kind of missed using the S-pen and someone suggested a stock-based custom 4.3 rom that I actually like so I've stuck with it for the time being. Now, I never really bothered with move to SD mods because I've learned to use my internal and external memory more efficiently but I figured if it's feature in TW I might as well take advantage since I'll be traveling abroad for two months come Dec. Well I've noticed that even after the apps are "moved" to the SD card, I don't regain any usable space on my internal card. I downloaded a game that's 779MB. My internal reduced from 3GB to 2.2GB. Okay. So I moved the game to my SD card. It moved 778MB to the SD card and 656KB remained on my phone. However, my internal only went from 2.2GB to 2.3GB. What?
I went back and calculated all the games I moved over and I've barely recovered more than 500MB for close to 30 games/apps moved to SD. All the games are still taking up close to their entire size in internal memory. Then what's the point? I have a 64GB class 10 card. Can someone enlighten me on what the hell is going on? I normally would just shrug of when things fail this like this but actually being tempted to use it and then finding it broken is really irritating."
"Also, I should point out that none of the storage is taken up by game data. Usually when I finish game and haven't touched it for a while I just clear data and uninstall. However, I will be traveling with a organization that specializes in providing AIDS/HIV care and education to developing nations, so I will going to multiple small villages across five countries. I'm not counting on having any kind of service for a good majority of the time so I thought "great" I'll take advantage of this new feature and download every game I've ever bought so I have something to occupy my time during the plane/train rides. I haven't downloaded any games on my phone since I got the N7 so every game currently on my phone is newly downloaded and never opened, so, no game data."
Any help would be much appreciated.
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move to SD feature only move your apk to your external sd card..not your sd data..sd data remain in internal storage.
sora9009 said:
move to SD feature only move your apk to your external sd card..not your sd data..sd data remain in internal storage.
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Yeah...I know.