Isn’t it frustrating when your camera gets sluggish after you put the memory card back in? Or when you connect the card to a Windows computer after your Mac, and have to browse through odd-looking files like Spotlight-V100?
Both of these problems are caused by the service files OS X writes onto your memory card when you work with it on a Mac. Normally, when you ask someone how to clean an SD card, the answer you get is “just format it”. But what if formatting the SD card is not an option, because you only want those junk files gone, not everything you’ve got there? Well, looks like you’re going to need an SD card cleaner (we recommend CleanMyDrive 2, it’s free and works with all kinds of external drives).
In this post, we’ll show you how to clear SD card junk with a cleaner app, so that you don’t have to format your SD card. But first, let’s figure out what these troublemaker files on your card are.
What’s there to clean on an SD card?
About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. Move Apps to the SD Card Depending on your phone and version of Android, you can also move apps to the SD card to free up space. Users with Android Marshmallow and above can do this by formatting the SD card as internal storage. Then, the SD card will be seen as local storage on that device.
After connecting your card to a Mac, you may have noticed some of these files on it:
- .DS_Store
- .Spotlight-V100
- .TemporaryItems
- .fseventsd
What are they? These are files the OS X creates as it works with your SD card, for various purposes. .DS_Store, for example, stores different folder data for the Finder, like how the icons are positioned. .fseventsd is a log file the system writes when files are deleted or modified. So, at some point they were useful to your Mac, but not anymore — and they are certainly useless to you. Even worse: they can corrupt your memory card’s performance and cause your camera to lag.
But the most annoying thing about these files is that they are hard to get rid of manually. Formatting the SD card helps, but if you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and delete your own files along with the junk — an SD cleaner app is the way out.
How to remove junk files with an SD card cleaner
External storage cleaner apps for Mac are not as common as they should be (someone please do something about that). But fortunately, we’ve got a free app that is tremendously helpful for SD cards and other types of external drives — CleanMyDrive 2. Here’s how you clean all the pesky junk files with it:
- Install CleanMyDrive 2 (it will settle in your menu bar for easy access).
- Click on the CleanMyDrive 2 icon in your menu bar. You’ll see all connected drives, including your SD card.
- Hit the Clean button next to your card.
Done. This will clear SD card junk and make the card run like new again. Even better: you can set the SD cleaner to remove junk automatically upon eject. To set up automatic cleanups, do the following:
- Open CleanMyDrive 2.
- Click on the little round icon next to your SD card.
- Enable Automatic cleanup.
That’s it. From now on, CleanMyDrive 2 will wipe out OS X service files every time you eject the SD card. You can forget about annoying .DS_Stores on your memory card, or the laggy camera after you’ve transferred pics onto your Mac. Get CleanMyDrive 2 for free and see how much an SD card cleaner can help. Seriously, it’s more useful that we’re telling you.
Most of the apps you install on your Android use the SD card to store them, along with their data. As long as you use the app these files are very important for its functionality. However, when you uninstall them, most of the times these dependent data files are not deleted from your SD card and they just sit there consuming your storage space which could have been used to save music and video files.
Manual cleaning can be done by mounting the SD card on the computer, but it’s very difficult to figure out which files are now junk and which are still used by applications that are installed on your Android. SD Maid is a cool application that can help you with this task and can be taken care of directly on Android without connecting it to a computer.
So let’s see how the app can be of use to us.
SD Maid for Android
Once installed, SD Maid works differently for a rooted and non-rooted device. In the article we will see how the app works for non-rooted phones and clear the junk files from the SD card. After the app initializes, it gives you a glimpse of used and free space that’s available on different partitions you have on your Android. The next tab, called Explorer, is a simple file explorer where you can browse your SD card and delete files manually.
I would recommend you to open the Corpsefinder module directly. This module is the magic wand of the app and makes it what it is. Once you open the module, tap on the screen to refresh the list. The app will scan your Android device for left over files that are no longer used by any of the apps that are installed on it and displays them one after another as a list. You can tap on a particular entry to find more information about it. The delete button at the top will clear these unnecessary files from your SD card.
The app scanner depends on whether you have granted root access to the app. For a normal user, the app will only clean the junk files from the mounted SD card but for root users it will scan the system data folder as well. The System Cleaner module scans for temporary files, gallery thumbnails, empty and LOST.DIR directories that are consuming space on your SD card and cleans them in one single touch. This also takes care of Windows generated temporary files which are created when you mount the SD card to your computer.
The Biggest File section is also a great addition which tells you which of the files that you have on your SD card are taking the maximum storage quota. This can be very helpful at times when you have copied movies to your card and forgotten about it completely. When you select a file in this module, it opens in the app’s file manager from where you can delete it.
The features to clean SD card offered by free version of the app ends there. The paid version provides some additional perks like App Cache Cleaner and Duplicate File finder. You can go for the pro version but there are free apps available in the Play Store which can take care of individual tasks.
Conclusion
If you have not cleaned your SD card for months, do try out the app. You will be shocked to see the amount of space the app will free up in a matter of few seconds.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
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