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Android keeps creating unwanted folders

Started Aug 21, 2016 | Discussions thread
OP sacentre Senior Member • Posts: 2,119
Re: Android keeps creating unwanted folders

CAcreeks wrote:

sacentre wrote:

I hope someone may be able to help me with this.

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 GT-N8020 running Android 4.1.2 with an external 64GB SD card. I store all my books on the ext SD card under a root folder called "Art and Literature" and access them with an app called Moon Reader Pro. Within the root folder, all the books are stored in subject folders and within those, folders with author names.

Every time I start Android and before running Moon Reader, I find that four duplicate but empty folders have been created at the root level. I keep deleting them but they always get re-created at boot up. The four folders are named for authors but are empty whereas the the four original folders (with the actual books in them, lower down the folder tree) are unaffected.

The app developer can think of no reason why this is happening as it occurs on boot when his app isn't even running so I'm looking elsewhere for the problem I thought it might have something to do with the many other book reader apps I installed to try out but subsequently deleted. I've made sure to erase any left over folders I can find that were created by these apps. One thing I thought of was trying to lock the SD card to see if this would provoke an error message of some sort but I don't know how to do that. Removing the card and re-inserting it after boot up sees the same four folders re-appear once it has been remounted by the filing system.

My wife complained of unnecessary folders being created after upgrading to Marshmallow, but you are two back with Jelly Bean.

Maybe Android OS is creating those folders so it can remember what Moon Reader has if your SD card were to be removed.

There is no way to lock a micro SD card.

Thanks for the reply. This still happens even if I uninstall Moon Reader so I have no idea which part of the OS can be doing this. All my folders containing actual books are unaffected. For example, my folder tree on the extSdcard looks like this:-

My Documents > Art and Literature >

General Fiction

Finance

Non-Fiction

Poetry

Science Fiction - Fantasy

Under General Fiction, I have folders with author names including Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and dozens more.

Just four empty folders with these four author's names are created under the top level folder Art and Literature every time the tablet is booted or the SD card unmounted/mounted.

When I tried a spare empty, formatted SD card and booted the tablet, it created folders My Documents > Art and Literature>

Anthony Trollope

Edith Wharton

Jack London

Sinclair Lewis

it's really weird. I've been using the GT-N8020 since its release and never seen a problem like this. I've posted this on several dedicated Android forums but so far with no usable suggestions as to how to stop it. It may be something I have to live with until I either do a factory reset or replace the tablet.

Thanks for reading.

Trevor

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