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I had installed quite a few applications on my tablet. But after I connected it to the PC for data transfer some of the applications got deleted by its own.

I connected to the PC by plugging in the USB thereafter turning ON the USB storage for data transfer. After the data transfer I switched the USB storage OFF only to find around 10 of my applications are missing.

I checked the Apps manager and found files like com.YYYYYY.XXXX, which I suppose are the left overs of the apps that were deleted.

I found a pattern(might be helpful) as this happened a couple of times with me. The application were mostly on the internal SD card(/mnt/sdcard) and most(not all) of the recent installed applications were deleted.

Since then I have not connected my tablet to the PC. How can I avoid applications getting deleted and still be able to successfully transfer data ?

Device Details

  • Device : Intex I Buddy Connect
  • Android Version: 4.0.4
  • Internal(Phone) Storage: ~ 1.0 GB
  • Internal Storage (eMMC I suppose) (/mnt/sdcard) : ~ 2 GB
  • micro SD Card (/mnt/extsd): 16GB (~ 14 GB)
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Did you eject the storage from your PC before turning it off on the device? – Matthew Read♦ Jan 11 at 18:29
@MatthewRead No I didn't, I First turned off the USB Storage and then pulled out the cable from the phone. – Sangeet Menon Jan 11 at 18:40
I think that may be your answer then, I will post it as such. – Matthew Read♦ Jan 11 at 18:41
No its not...I have tried the other way around as well and still got apps missing... – Sangeet Menon Jan 11 at 18:43
Leave your apps on the internal phone storage (1GB). However: Paid apps will still be encrypted and moved to the sdcard on some devices (If you see a tmpfs on /storage/sdcard0/.android_secure, where sdcard0 is your real SDcard). Reason: The .android_secure folder holds encrypted loop-back images that are mounted (and then act as the app-storage folder). If Windows fiddles with them or you delete them manually, crypto-setup will fail and the app will disappear. – ce4 Jan 11 at 18:43
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1 Answer

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You should ensure that you dismount or "eject" the storage from your PC before turning off storage sharing from your device or disconnecting it. The PC may not flush all writes and properly close resources until you do that, leaving the device storage in a bad state. In Windows, you can right-click the drive in Windows Explorer and choose "Eject" or do the same from the Safely Remove Hardware icon near the clock on the start bar: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/Safely-remove-devices-from-your-computer

As I noted in chat, Android has also been pretty finicky with homescreen shortcuts (my SGS loses all shortcuts to apps on the SD card upon reboot, for example). It could be that you are seeing the same thing here, and the apps are not really being deleted.

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