Thanks
@Hadron &
@EarlyMon for being kind to me. What's are the caution should I take for using the mentioned tool by you. I didn't get whatever its on help/guide section. Could you favor me helping in brief about how it could be harmful when misused.
It's an actual cleaning tool so it will actually go under the hood, evaluate, and set things up for deletion - unlike the apps that just fake it or oversimplify things.
The way to use the tool, especially when starting out - is to begin on the Overview page (the one that comes up by default) and trying one of the cleaners. It will crunch along and eventually be ready - tap that bar again and it will ask if you want to really delete things or not.
However - the right thing to do is to tap the three lines at top left - a menu slides out - and tap the same choice there that you did for the overview.
That's going to bring up the behind-the-scenes detail listing - and that's your best friend.
You can look that over, and maybe say to yourself, "Fair enough!" - and go back to the Overview and confirm that you want it all cleaned up.
OR - and this is most important - you can decide one by one to keep or delete things based on your needs or whether you think it's worth bothering with at that time.
Here's a good example of what I mean in my case, I ran that myself just before posting to make sure it was the one I wanted to suggest -
SD Maid is just a robot, it's very smart but it's not intelligent. It wants to save me a lot of space by deleting all of my Gallery thumbnails.
If I were desperate for space or if I didn't trust my Gallery, that might be a good idea.
However - I'm not desperate for space and my Gallery is doing just fine. If I were to have just said, "OK SD Maid, do your thing, I trust you!" - then the next time I went to my Gallery, it would have been blank, and I'd have to stop and reboot my phone (in my particular case) and then wait a half hour for my thumbnails to rebuild before I could just show off some picture of the kids and brag - and to me - that's harmful.
So there's a case of using it cautiously to avoid harm - and here's another -
It can clean databases. Cleaning databases sounds like a good, professional thing to do, so why not?
Again, I gave that a sample run and opened up the side panel for details and what I found saved me.
It was smart enough to realize that I didn't bother to clean up some old apps before uninstalling them. HOWEVER - it wasn't smart enough to know that the last thing I would want would be for it to remove my backup app's old database. I haven't used that particular backup in a while because I haven't needed to - but if I let it remove the database and needed to restore from that (it could happen, that's why I keep it around) then I'd have all kinds of trouble to deal with.
So, it's powerful and you want to put on your thinking cap while you use it.
How do you get garbage files?
Simple. Don't do it the right way like
@Crashdamage (I know he does it right lol) - instead be like me.
The correct way to uninstall an app is to go to your app manager, select that app, clear data and/or cache, and then uninstall it.
I know that and either out of bad habit or being forgetful, I often just delete an app and then find out weeks later that I have files that I don't know where they go. So - sometimes, SD Maid can help me.
As for just clearing out all of your app caches, that is VERY rarely your best friend. By the time your system is that corrupted, what you really probably want to do is to back up everything that you can (I recommend Helium Backup), do a factory data reset to just clear out everything, and then do a backup restore. If your phone is really getting bogged down and it's not a bad app causing it, that's what will restore that like-new performance.
And another good thing to explore - google for: "(your phone model) clear cache from recovery"
Android devices have a hidden mini-operating system, hidden away, called recovery. When you get an OTA update for your phone and it has to reboot to apply it - then during the reboot, Android stops running, recovery recovers the downloaded update, and applies it to your phone, then reboots back into Android - you never see it working.
Very often, you can get into with a special combination of buttons pressed at once during a power-on. If true for your model, you can choose there to "clean/wipe/erase cache" - and that will clear out the main Android cache.
Unlike cleaning out the app caches, if your phone has become laggy or wonky, clearing out the main Android cache can restore that like-new performance - and ought to be considered before going to the factory data reset.
In the old days, you could clear the main Android cache with a one-button click app and they do still exist - but they don't work. If you think about it, Android cannot be used to clear Android while Android is running. (Edit - unless you're rooted, know what you're doing and want to see exactly why that's a bad idea.
)
If you have more detailed questions about SD Maid, check out the support thread at -
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1013063
Hope this helps!
PS - don't worry about that kindness thing lol - we're all in this together.
