[Android Central Question]

Hi, I have an Alcatel U5 Mobile phone. Now I am getting to a critical stage. My SD storage is nearly empty , but my ordinary storage is in the red and nearly full. Could anyone possibly tell me how I can send most of my storage stuff onto the SD card so as to leave a bit more room on my ordinary storage. Sorry if I did not explain myself very well, as I am 75 and although I might be able to build a pc, lol, I cannot for the life of me fathom this out.
Thank you in advance.

Jimmy Loughran

[Luckyjfl]

My SD storage is nearly empty and I am getting a Red , full Line on my other storage. Is it possible to transfer items from the ordinary storage to the SD storage.Bear with me if I have not explained it very well.

[Rukbat]

You explained it fine.

It's possible to move any files to the SD card, but please don't. Use Copy instead then, if the copy was successful, delete the original. (If a Move goes bad in the middle, you can lose both the original and the copy. If a copy goes bad, all you lose is the copy and you can copy it again.)

As I said, though - files. Not apps. Pictures, videos, music, tones (ringtones, notification tones, alarm tones), documents, any files. "Moving" apps to the SD card doesn't, it moves pieces of the app and leaves a link to each piece in internal storage (because that's where Android looks for them), so it saves you almost nothing. And, since Android apps have to keep their current state at all times (because if the app is running in the background and Android needs the RAM it's taking, Android just kills it. When you bring that killed app to the foreground again, Android loads it into RAM and tells it to start where it left off. To you it appears that the app was always running, waiting for you to get back to it.) The problem is that while eMMC (internal) storage is designed to take constant writing, SD storage isn't. It's designed for "write once, read many", because it's rated in number of writes. So if you move a fast action game to the SD card, it's going to be writing to the card almost constantly - and the card will fail a lot sooner than it should.

So keep things you move to the card to those things that you may read 5 times a day (my list of medications is like that - I almost never change the list, but it gets put up on the screen every time I go to a doctor - and at 77, that's often. A video you're going to watch many times, pictures you're going to look at many times, things like that are fine. Just no apps. (And some apps won't run from the SD card, so the developer has turned off the "Move to SD card" function, so you can'tmove it to the card.)

[ManiacJoe]

The SD card is a great place to store your videos, pictures, music, and documents.
You can use any file browser app to copy the files to the SD card.

Your apps are best left on the internal storage.

Many current versions of apps that use lots of data space (games, GPS, maps, camera...) give you the option of putting their data on the SD card. See the settings in each app to see what is available.

[B. Diddy]

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[B. Diddy]

Duplicate threads merged.