My MetroPCS Total Protection plan requires me to download Lookout Mobile.
If you have a Samsung phone, you either need to own a battery company (it can kill a battery in a few hours in a Samsung phone) or you need to turn Lookout's main feature - virus protection - off. I prefer Avast, since I've been using it for years, both on phones and on my PCs, but AVG, Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky and Avira are all good.
As far as Lookout's ability to locate your phone, Android does that -
Android Device Manager will locate it and/or wipe it. And there are apps that will take a selfie of anyone attempting to unlock the phone unsuccessfully 3 times (or some are settable for the number of times) and email you the picture and the latitude and longitude the phone was at when it was done. And they're free and don't kill the battery.
Lookout backs up my photoes and contacts as well as security etc. I also have Google Drive on my phone which also has all my pictures backed up.
There's an old computer saying - any file not backed up is a file you don't need. I make that "backed up to at least 2 destinations". And I also say that "too many backups" is like "too good health" - there's no such thing. If your phone and Lookout's servers and backups all go at the same time (you lose your phone the day California finally slides into the Pacific [assuming their servers are in the part that goes], you have no backup. But if you also back up on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box ... there are a few dozen free cloud services), no matter how bad your luck is, unless the planet explodes, you still have a few backups. (The baby will never take her first step again, no matter HOW important that video is to you.)
I also am getting mixed messages about needing Clean Master or if there is a simpler smaller app to clean junk.
Read the description of ANY "cleaning" program. If it mentions cleaning unused apps out of RAM, uninstall it if you have it and don't install it if you haven't.
Multitasking the Android Way explains why, written by a lady who wrote Android code - and the person who wrote the code knows it a lot better than anyone else. Keeping RAM "clean" is great in Windows - it murders Android efficiency. Use something like
CCleaner if it'll make you feel better, and read
Low on Space? Dump logcat. But Android itself is pretty good at managing junk.
Storage is something else. More and more, people "develop" apps without knowing how to write code. They use "rngines" and "skeletons" that load a lot of code they don't use into their apps, just so they can use one or two functions. That makes apps larger and larger as time goes on. (Writing code seems to be shameful or something.) So if there's not enough internal storage for your apps, the operating system's use (which typically takes 400-500MB these days) and any downloading you want to do, your phone is too small. And there's no way to do anything about that but uninstall apps. Indiscriminately "cleaning junk" doesn't do that, at best it accomplishes nothing, and at worst it messes up your phone.
What type file manager I need just to be sure my photos are on my external drive and I'm not saving 80 images from games. Do I need to boost ram, kill tasks?
The one between your ears will always be the best one. Manually send the files you don't want to lose to your backup cloud account or your computer (or both). (Many apps make the pictures they download "invisible" to media apps, like picture backups, so they don't get backed up. [Why would you want to back up the picture of the white car charger over on the right of this page?] But many of them don't [because not everyone who releases an app actually knows how to develop an Android app], so a lot of those pictures that you don't want to back up will be backed up. And there's no app that can determine which "un-invisibled" pictures you don't want backed up. That charger is just a picture, like the one of your face. Only your brain can decide which one to back up and which one not to back up.)
I have 7% storage left device/internal sd. All my pictures are on external sd of which i have only used less than a quarter of. Can anyone help me with do i need google drive, is there easier cleaners, file managers please?
Move all your pictures, documents, music (that can be moved - much purchased music can't be), videos - anything but apps - to the card. If you make local (on the phone) backups, make them to the card. Any file can be saved to the card - not all apps can
run from the card, and moving an app to the card leaves pointers in internal storage (where Android looks for apps) to where, on the card, the files are. Data files are different - a picture on the card is the same as a picture in internal storage, except that you can carry 20 cards around in your shirt pocket.
There's nothing in the "internal sd" (a phrase thought up by marketing, like a 3-pronged tuning fork - there's no SD card in the phone) you can move to external sd, Google Drive or anywhere else except photos, music, videos, documents - data. What takes up most internal space is apps, and that's where they ave to be. (Some few can run properly from the external card, more can run, but with quirks and errors, most can't run from the card but a lot of those can be moved to the card, because the person "developing" them didn't know to not allow them to be moved. Android was written to use the external card to store data - don't depend on it to run apps from.)
Which apps to use? That's personal taste. I use
MyFiles for a few things (especially external USB sticks - and it lets you choose files by category as well as the normal way, by location),
Total Commander to copy or move files from one place to another (in landscape mode you can have them both - the origin and the destination folders - on the screen and just drag the file(s) and
ES File Explorer for serious work. I use Dropbox and Google Drive for cloud storage (both for having a backup of the backup, and Drive is faster for files I really need to be able to access on the phone
and on my computers - even at the same time. (You can only do that with certain types of files, mainly data bases.)
I also use
App Backup & Restore to back my apps up (it creates apk files, so I can find the file in a file manager, press it and it'll install by default),
Helium to back up the data from the apps (it'll back up the apps too, but then I have to use Helium to restore them) and
SMS Backup & Restore to back up my texts. They all back up to the external card, and I copy the backups to my desktop - both locally and to Google Drive. (The others are self-evident, but Helium's folder is named carbon - the app's old name.) All my contacts are Google contacts, so they're backed up on Drive automatically (and accessible at
Google Contacts. I also back up contacts and messages with
MyPhoneExplorer Client. (It's the only way I know of to easily change, say, a Device contact into a Google contact - and all contacts should be Google account contacts.)
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