- Jul 27, 2002
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The whole root, system partition, sdcard thing confuse me. As you will see I am a total noob in this area so please bear with me and hopefully someone will educate me.
I have heard some people talking about moving their applications to sdcard to save space in the system partition (is that the correct term?). I do not know what that means so I decided to see for myself, and gained root access in my Nexus 7. Browsing the folder structure, I am completely lost because I have no idea which is which. I tried to draw what I am trying to learn about;
1. /sdcard/ (along with /root/ directory and other system-level directory)
2. /storage/emulated/0/
3. /storage/emulated/legacy/
4. /storage/sdcard0/
Prior to root access, I believe I was looking at #2, which would be /storage/emulated/0/. That's where I saw some application folders as well as data folders. Upon gaining root access, however, I found three more folders that seem to contain identical contents.. I suppose they are not duplicates (four copies of everything?), but I am terribly confused.
My questions (for now):
- What are these 4 for? And which one is "real" in a physical sense? (does it even make sense to refer it as "real" instead of "shortcuts" or "aliases"?)
- Which one is the system partition, or ROM? Are they referring to the same thing?
- Which one is "external storage"? Do "external storage" and "sdcard" mean the same thing? And which is "internal storage"?
- When people talk about moving stuff to sdcard (e.g. "app to sdcard"), which one is the starting point and which one is the end point?
Obviously appreciated.
I have heard some people talking about moving their applications to sdcard to save space in the system partition (is that the correct term?). I do not know what that means so I decided to see for myself, and gained root access in my Nexus 7. Browsing the folder structure, I am completely lost because I have no idea which is which. I tried to draw what I am trying to learn about;
1. /sdcard/ (along with /root/ directory and other system-level directory)
2. /storage/emulated/0/
3. /storage/emulated/legacy/
4. /storage/sdcard0/
Prior to root access, I believe I was looking at #2, which would be /storage/emulated/0/. That's where I saw some application folders as well as data folders. Upon gaining root access, however, I found three more folders that seem to contain identical contents.. I suppose they are not duplicates (four copies of everything?), but I am terribly confused.
My questions (for now):
- What are these 4 for? And which one is "real" in a physical sense? (does it even make sense to refer it as "real" instead of "shortcuts" or "aliases"?)
- Which one is the system partition, or ROM? Are they referring to the same thing?
- Which one is "external storage"? Do "external storage" and "sdcard" mean the same thing? And which is "internal storage"?
- When people talk about moving stuff to sdcard (e.g. "app to sdcard"), which one is the starting point and which one is the end point?
Obviously appreciated.
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