External SD Card Storage

[Rawkgoat]

I'm sure my question has been asked and answered before, but I'm not sure what to search for without a crazy long search that turns up bazillions of results.

I have an unrooted Galaxy S4 running 4.4 and have several apps "moved" to the SD Card. Some of them are quite large, but predominantly the storage space of my Spotify premium offline library is a few GB. I had to do a factory reset, and eventually received a new phone from Verizon... I have most things set back up and downloaded again, and Spotify is downloading all of my stuff again (I did this all manually).

My question is... is all of my "old" app data still using up space on my SD card? Is all of that huge amount of data from the last spotify install still taking up space, along with all the old games and apps that I had on my SD card? Am I doing something incorrect? Am I supposed to wipe data off the SD card before I start downloading and re-installing all of my apps?

Thanks!! ~John

 

[kate]

Hello Rawkgoat, and welcome

Without looking at the SD card it's hard to know for sure. Some factory resets will include an option to wipe the SD card so the old data may or may not have been deleted. Can you use a file explorer on your phone, or put the SD card in your computer, to look and see if any old data is on it?

If your new phone is also a Galaxy S4 you can find a forum for it here:
Samsung Galaxy S4 - Android Forums

 

[Rawkgoat]

Well, I pulled the SD card out before the restart and would have avoided allowing the OS to wipe anything. (Didn't want to loose pictures, mp3s, and other data). I can use file explorer and see all kinds of stuff related to the apps on the SD card... I just was curious if it would just automatically over-write information from the same apps, or if it made copies... not sure how to tell in File explorer or plugging in the phone to windows and using the windows file explorer either.... for instance... on the SD Card in the "Android/data" folder there is only one folder named com.spotify.music but then opening the extSDCard/Android/data/com.spotify.music/files/spotifycache/storage folder there are 257 items.... and no real way (that I understand) to know what's what.

 

[kate]

You can look at the date each file was modified to see how old it is. I'm not sure how Spotify stores files though.