[Q] Duplicate directories - Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III

I have a Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III. Rooted, has CM10.2.1 on it. I noticed that the sdcard0 location is effectively being duplicated, sort of. Using ASTRO File Manager, for example, shows the exact same files (not copies or shortcuts) in /storage/sdcard0, and /storage/emulated/0, and /storage/emulated/legacy. I've found threads where people discuss this; something to do with multi-user support in JB.
But so far everyone only seems to be annoyed or confused with keeping track of different directories. For me, it's actually duplicating the files. If I open up Gallery, for example, I see two (or three, on one attempt of re-flashing the ROM), of everything. Two folders of the same DCIM folder, two folders of the same Wallpaper folder, etc. The same thing happens with music and videos. Attempting to delete the 'legacy' folder deletes everything in the other folders, and vice versa.
Seeing two or three of every individual item is obnoxious. But that's what I haven't been able to find anything for yet; an actual resolution to getting rid of (or at least hiding) these duplications.
Any help? I've tried searching around, but haven't been able to find any threads where the exact same issue as mine was discussed. If I'm retreading old ground, please point me to a previous discussion / solution.
Thanks.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=37096279
Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda app-developers app

Related

SugarSync - Duplicate Device problem

Not sure if this is the right forum for this post, but here goes...
I've been using SugarSync for a few months now to see if it works for me the way I need. Now, after flashing a couple ROMs (and reformatting my SD card) for experimentation, I find that the SS website is listing two instances of my Inspire, one has a folder structure and synchronized files, the other does not have anything listed at all.
Unfortunately their system does not delete devices, but merely moves them into a 'recycle' area, so that you can reinstate them later. That's not what I want to do at this point, I'd rather start over "from scratch" by completely purging the two devices and adding my phone.
The reason I want to purge and begin over again is that when I tried to 'restore' my device, I wound up with duplicate pictures, and they were placed in a different path in a folder that was not the original - IOW, instead of using the DCIM/100MEDIA folder, SS was placing the synchronized pictures in the 'My Sugarsync Folders' directory.
Anyway, I have made two attempts at email support and one post on their forum, but none of these attempts have received any response.
Wondering if any of you guys have had this happen to you, and what the solution might be.
Nobody else is experiencing this problem?

[Q] What's on my SD Card?

I was flicking through Root Browser on my SD Card today and I noticed some things that I have no idea what they are. In the past, I deleted them and it messed with my gallery or with other kinds of stuff.
The specific names of the folders are as follows:
burstlyImageCache
LazyList
LOST.DIR
Mikulu
myrecord
.wiyun
.udstate
.config_c38
What are these? what happens if I delete them? I'm not overly concerned, I'm just curious.
Chrisruns said:
I was flicking through Root Browser on my SD Card today and I noticed some things that I have no idea what they are. In the past, I deleted them and it messed with my gallery or with other kinds of stuff.
The specific names of the folders are as follows:
burstlyImageCache
LazyList
LOST.DIR
Mikulu
myrecord
.wiyun
.udstate
.config_c38
What are these? what happens if I delete them? I'm not overly concerned, I'm just curious.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
generally if you do not know what something is, don't delete it. I think the image cache thing has to do with the camera, and anything with a dot in front of it is a system file, so leave those alone.
Delete it if its unuseful!
generally if you do not know what something is, don't delete it. I think the image cache thing has to do with the camera, and anything with a dot in front of it is a system file, so leave those alone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't agree!!!
Apps often let unused files in various folders, saturating the memory of the SD Card.
If u don't know what its for, ask (or ask google )
For exemple, wiyun is a chinese game editor. Hence .wiyun is its trash directory. If you don't have any games left from this editor, you can safely delete the folder.
Mikulu folder is probably from Mikulu music player ...
etc.
Directories myrecord & myalbum
Directories myrecord & myalbum are created by the
"Easy Downloader" app and by the "Pro" variant also.
Creating empty files with equal names prevents directory
creation. But uninstalling is the only way to avoid this completely.
Best regards
P.S. I assume that other "Easy ..." apps by the 2Easy Team
developer will create them because of the in app promotion
content.

What is this symbol mean? Some of my pictures/vids no longer "working"

Problem: Some of my pictures and videos no longer work and they show either one of the symbols (shown in attachments). I can't seem to figure out any sort of pattern other then the majority of them seem to be older pictures/vids. When I mount my phone to my computer it can locate problem files but cannot open them. "media player cannot open file because it is unsupported" or something to that extent.
I'm running Clean Rom 4.0 SE
I recently deleted some old TitBackups and some old Rom back ups....is it possible when I backed up it corrupted some of my files? I'm not positive if the pictures/vids were working before I had done this or after.
The file is probably corrupted. There have been a few threads where people have flashed things and lost pictures and videos on their phone storage.
Sent from my HTC One X using xda app-developers app

SketchBook/Gallery File Location Confusion

Last night, I was looking through my Gallery and saw a few things I'd drawn in SketchBook Pro. Not everything I'd drawn in SK was there, but some were. I figured they were copies or thumbnails or something and, because I like to keep my file systems clean, I deleted them from the Gallery.
Well, turns out they weren't copies or thumbnails, but MY DRAWINGS! Ugh!
So my question is, is there anything comparable to a recycle bin on this thing, where my drawings might still exist? A second question is, does the Gallery just gather all the image-type files and display them, no matter where they are?
Thanks in advance!
loribuono said:
Last night, I was looking through my Gallery and saw a few things I'd drawn in SketchBook Pro. Not everything I'd drawn in SK was there, but some were. I figured they were copies or thumbnails or something and, because I like to keep my file systems clean, I deleted them from the Gallery.
Well, turns out they weren't copies or thumbnails, but MY DRAWINGS! Ugh!
So my question is, is there anything comparable to a recycle bin on this thing, where my drawings might still exist? A second question is, does the Gallery just gather all the image-type files and display them, no matter where they are?
Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gallery does display all images on your tablet unless they are in a hidden folder. If you have images you do not want to be seen in Gallery you can rename the folder they are in by placing a . in front of the folder name. This will make Gallery see the folder as hidden and not access it. However this may also cause some other problems. Example I have a bunch of epub books with cover images with them and I did not want to have all those images showing in Gallery (there are a lot of them) so I made the folder hidden and it worked for Gallery, but I read the books in Cool Reader and all the sudden Cool Reader could not find the books either. I worked around this by creating special folder for my book I am currently reading.
create a .nomedia file and place it in the folder. it'll keep some apps from scanning the folders.

Android 11 and .nomedia file

I was about to post a question about this, but I just figured this out myself. My phone recently updated to Android 11. I have an SD-Card which has music on it - along with a lot of album art. Since the update, all these album art photos have been cluttering up my gallery. Every time I add a .nomedia file in here (which also was there before the update), it seems to get automatically deleted (no, not hidden). I tried copying a .nomedia file from elsewhere on the phone. I even tried popping out the SD-Card and adding the file via PC. As soon as Android touches it, it deletes the file again.
So, here is the issue. With Android 11, it is creating some default folders (I wish it wouldn't clutter up things with these empty folders that I never need or use). Those default folders include: Music, Pictures, Movies. These are created at the top level on the SD-Card and on internal storage. So, if you are also using one of those folders for something, it's going to auto delete the .nomedia file. In my case, I just moved my music into a Musics folder instead(and ensured it has a .nomedia file, of course.
Hopefully this will save someone else from wasting their time trying to figure out why this is happening!
pacaveli420 said:
I was about to post a question about this, but I just figured this out myself. My phone recently updated to Android 11. I have an SD-Card which has music on it - along with a lot of album art. Since the update, all these album art photos have been cluttering up my gallery. Every time I add a .nomedia file in here (which also was there before the update), it seems to get automatically deleted (no, not hidden). I tried copying a .nomedia file from elsewhere on the phone. I even tried popping out the SD-Card and adding the file via PC. As soon as Android touches it, it deletes the file again.
So, here is the issue. With Android 11, it is creating some default folders (I wish it wouldn't clutter up things with these empty folders that I never need or use). Those default folders include: Music, Pictures, Movies. These are created at the top level on the SD-Card and on internal storage. So, if you are also using one of those folders for something, it's going to auto delete the .nomedia file. In my case, I just moved my music into a Musics folder instead(and ensured it has a .nomedia file, of course.
Hopefully this will save someone else from wasting their time trying to figure out why this is happening!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This makes no sense, please explain in more detail.
android1977 said:
This makes no sense, please explain in more detail.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you're storing your music files in any of the default folders, Android is going to auto delete your .nomedia file if you try to put one there. Ergo, the solution is you need to store your music in a folder named something else.
pacaveli420 said:
If you're storing your music files in any of the default folders, Android is going to auto delete your .nomedia file if you try to put one there. Ergo, the solution is you need to store your music in a folder named something else.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks that's what I did and got lucky, I was so desperate I signed up to XDA just to comment I gotta say XDA I love your site and been reading for a couple year's now, enjoy the information provided, thanks guy's for all your hard work
pacaveli420 said:
If you're storing your music files in any of the default folders, Android is going to auto delete your .nomedia file if you try to put one there. Ergo, the solution is you need to store your music in a folder named something else.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for saving my media library! I've been tortured by this issue since using the new phone, finally!
hello, i just get Android 11 on my MI A3, and those folders ( music, pictures, movies )appears on my sd card, they are useless for me, is there a way to delete them?
before Android 11, i didn't have this problem because i choosed " use sd as external support " instead of "use sd as extended memory" when inserting the sd card, but now even if i make the same choice, the folders are there and i can't delete them.
Sort of off topic but not really:
How do I stop it from creating these default folders? It's extremely annoying. I don't have my SD card structured that way and never have. I've deleted the default music, movies, etc folders numerous times now as they just clutter up the root directory and they keep reappearing. Is there a solution to this?
This seems to be a part of Android 11s default folder structure which no one ever bothered to do something about. I wouldn't be surprised if it's there for "security reasons" as well as a communist one. As in you only have the option to use these "secure" folders or else it won't show up in your apps at all.
This might be a way for Google to slowly faze out SDCards entirely while only giving you the option to use said folders for your "private" stuff akin to how IOS (kinda) works. In other words, they are doing it on purpose and no one ever bothered to read the fine print.
Obviously private music and other media collections is the root (see what I did there) cause of the problem. They don't want you to have those at all, And want you to use streaming services instead (tinfoil hat). Which is probably what these folders will probably end up being used for.
Netflix and Spotify allow you to store music on your device, but it's encrypted and will probably end up there at some point in Androids lifecycle. Obviously these files don't need .nomedia since the files are encrypted and will only show up in said app either way which makes the above meaningless.
Most of this is speculation obviously, but we've slowly been moving towards this trend if you look at how System apps were split into app and priv-app and so on. At some point in time only certain apps that has had the blessing of Google will be allowed to read anything off your storage. This happened with Chrome not to long ago where they blocked side-loaded extensions from running.
You will slowly see Android turning into IOS because they (Google) and big-tech in general wants 100% control of what you can and can't do. And everything based on AOSP or LOS is gonna follow suit because no one gives a flying fudge because that's too bothersome. The fragmentation of custom builds based on LOS/AOSP in general already shows that this has always been the case for the last 10 years. Linux in general is no different either as can be seen with wokeism. Except that was through decimation via woke people and not big-tech.
I was going crazy thinking this issue was specific to my samsung's stock rom. I started searching about this once I noticed it on LOS 18. Glad I'm not alone
I tend to be a little OCD about my folder structures but at this point I don't mind making a separate folder to avoid album arts in my gallery.
I believe I found a solution to this. It's been about a week or two with no further incident now. My solution was to delete the default folders from the root of the SD card because I don't use them, then create blank files that used those names. Haven't had a problem since.
I use the top level pictures folder because of a compatibility issue with programs that have small file path character limits that cause the program to hang. I don't use them anymore but I haven't had a reason to move it back where I had it previously and that would only make the default folder issue worse if I did. Or at least it would have until now with this discovery.
I do not use the movies and music folders, and if I move my pictures folder back where I had it I won't use that one either. Having them pop up on their own to clutter my root directory on both my SD card and my phone itself was very annoying. After deleting the movies and music folders off of the root of my SD card for the billionth time and getting rid of the empty default folders on my phone again, I created two blank files on my SD card root called Music and Movies. Ever since then the default folders haven't reappeared. On top of that, it hasn't created any ".thumbnails" folders all over the place like it always used to do either. That includes doing so on the internal phone storage. Creating those files on the SD card seems to have broken the whole process. I imagine the same would work vice versa for OP since it sounds like they use those default folders. Find an empty default folder on internal storage, delete it, create a file and name it the name of the folder you deleted (case sensitive), and that should disable the annoying default folder management process too. I can't vouch for that method, but I can vouch for it working when you do so on the SD card.
I just noticed this today on my tab s7+.
From what I can tell, the .nomedia file nolonger does anything on its own. However, if I add the .nomedia file to a folder, then rename the folder placing a . in front, of course it hides the entire folder. When I rename the folder again, removing the ., the .nomedia file now works. No matter how many times I rename the folder, the gallery does not see it until I remove the .nomedia file.
pool_shark said:
I just noticed this today on my tab s7+.
From what I can tell, the .nomedia file nolonger does anything on its own. However, if I add the .nomedia file to a folder, then rename the folder placing a . in front, of course it hides the entire folder. When I rename the folder again, removing the ., the .nomedia file now works. No matter how many times I rename the folder, the gallery does not see it until I remove the .nomedia file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thank you pool shark.. i tried what you did/suggested and it worked. thanks.

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