Workflow for deleting large numbers of file/folders.

[JohnFredC]

Yesterday I had occasion to run out of space on sdcard0 (internal). The culprits were two: 1) many gigabytes of downloaded files associated with my rss reader app and 2) many gigabytes of files in .thumbnails.

The process of cleaning my "drive" took several hours.

The first issue encountered was in filtering the files to delete. My goal was to select all files/folders in certain directories that were older than 5 days, but TC 2.02 does not implement a date/time filtering mechanism on the Selection button. Also, the Search button only implements "not older than" (aka "newer than"), so automatically searching (or selecting!) files older than 5 days is not possible.

This meant I had to make the selections by "finger". After a "Select *.*". I had to touch every file/folder (over 1000 in all) that I wished to deselect/preserve from deletion.

Since the sdcard WILL fill periodically, the prospect of repeating this rather manual activity is daunting.

Please tell me I missed something! At the very best, the search panel desperately needs more options.

The second issue is with regards to the time interval required for the deletion activity to execute, once initiated: 3 hours! As tablets go, my tablet is pretty darn fast. But 3 hours seems a long time for any tablet, even if the number of files (1000's) is large and/or the tablet slow.

Thanks in advance for advice. I hope to be proven an idiot.


Samsung Note 8, 16Gb, 4.1.2 not rooted[face=arial][/face]

[gmb]

For complicated operations with large numbers of file/folders: Total Commander for Windows + Android ADB plugin
http://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=34980

[JohnFredC]

Thanks for the reponse! I'll try that when I get back to my desktop.

Still, it would be great if TC had more options in the search and selection dialogs.