Can A Deleted Folder (And Its Contents) Be Fully Deleted, Or Recovered?

[Rickoff]

My RCA Viking Pro 10 tablet with Android OS was getting slow, and seeing that more than 90% of the internal storage capacity was being used I decided to free up some storage space. I decided on moving everything in my Music and Photo folders out to a USB flash drive. Unlike on my laptop computer, there didn't seem to be a way to move those folders to an external drive, so I used the Copy and Paste functions to copy each of those folders and then paste them to the USB drive. That worked fine, but then I wanted to delete the two folders from my tablet's internal storage. I selected the two folders and sent them to the trash bin, and they were gone, but when I checked my internal storage free space I saw that I hadn't gained anything. Figuring that the trash bin must be like the recycle bin on my laptop computer, and that "deleted" files and folders actually remain in the bin until it is emptied, I looked for ways to to that. Unlike with my laptop, it appears that there is no icon that can be clicked to open the trash bin and view or empty its contents. After doing some google searches, I found a posting by someone who said that he was able to find his trash bin contents in File Manager's Android\Data\com.android.gallery3d\files\.trashcan folder. When I looked for that, and opened the com.android.gallery3d folder, the only thing in there was a "cache" folder. No "files" folder was found. Now I'm thinking that perhaps the "files" folder only appears if the user directly deletes some files, and that since I deleted folders this may be why I see no "files" folder. Figuring it is likely that someone else has run into this problem, I'm wondering if there is an app that can detect deleted folders and either permanently delete them, or restore them so that I can try just deleting the files within them. I know there are several apps, like Recycle Bin, and Dumpster, that will find files that were sent to the trash bin, but are there any apps that can find deleted folders and offer a means of permanently removing them? Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer.

 

[Traveller]

Android prior to version 6 didn't include a file manager, and the file managers included in Android versions 6 through 10 are very basic, with no bells and whistles. I'm assuming that RCA included a file manager app of some kind in its ROM simply because of the added features a third party file manager has. You may want to check its settings thoroughly; the app may have a recycle bin feature like ES File Explorer does.

If the file manager doesn't have anything special in settings, SD Maid on the Play Store should be able to help you free up the space.

 

[Rickoff]

I have Android version 5.0, and there is a File Manager that came loaded. I had thought, as I mentioned earlier, that possibly the Android\Data\com.android.gallery3d\files\.trashcan folder might only show if I had deleted some individual files, but I tried reloading a couple of photo files into a "Test" folder that I created, and then deleted them. Still no luck finding trashcan folder, so perhaps it only shows in some newer Android versions.

As to your suggestion to run SD Maid, I had already run Ccleaner (which works the same as SD Maid) to gain more space on the tablet, and had gained about 875 Megabytes, but that's all. I did stumble upon a fix, though, that freed up 20 Gigabytes! This happened because I found AppLock Pro to be annoying, and couldn't see a good reason to keep it. As soon as I uninstalled it, and checked my storage settings to see how much space that had gained me, I was delighted to see I suddenly had freed up 20 GB. I couldn't figure how that would be possible, because according to the information found in Settings\Apps\AppLockPro, I should only have gained around 150 MB. Since it was always running to monitor the installed apps, as well as to warn that new apps be locked, the monitoring data is probably either constantly being updated, or updated at the end of each session in an app data file that becomes larger and larger as time goes on. In any case, uninstalling AppLock Pro was just what I needed to free up a huge swath of drive space on my tablet, and this greatly increased the speed of my Android OS.

 

[Traveller]

Congrats on solving your problem, even if my advice wasn't terribly useful or helpful.