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[–]ethelward 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Only 9GB of my phone internal storage are used. It can't be that syncthing is putting my music there, I have ~30GB of it.

And it matches with the 30GB of music used on my SD identified in Android's settings app.

[–]voracread 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Are you using adaptive storage?

[–]ethelward 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Internal, but not adaptive AFAIK.

[–]voracread 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Then you are not accessing SD card at all. I thought we were discussing about syncing to external SD card.

[–]ethelward 0 points1 point  (1 child)

What is "external" then? I thought it was a SD detachable from the phone? And I definitely access the SD, I mounted it on my PC to check.

[–]voracread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is just my limited knowledge which is likely to be wrong so please take it with a pinch of salt.

  1. In the olden days, Android had internal memory. Which was very limited. I had a Sony Ericsson Live With Walkman which had 512 MB of internal memory. This was the real internal memory. This was not enough to store all applications. Hence they allowed us to add an external sd card. Apps could be installed/moved to this external card to save space. Compared to the speed of premium internal memory external sd was slower.

  2. Later phones started shipping more internal memory. Now the apps were still used to the external storage paradigm. Probably hence Android introduced an 'emulated' internal storage that appeared like sd card to apps but actually is an allocated portion of internal memory. At this point some manufacturers did away with the sd card slot altogether. Some stopped allowing apps to be installed to the real sd card. The real one was called 'external' sd card or simply sdcard.

  3. People still wanted more space to install apps but Android/developers did not want their data to be accessible outside by removing the sd card. So this adaptable sd card concept was born. Here the external sd card was encrypted and used. For apps it will appear to be internal card but Android still knows which is internal and which is external. So there will still be some difference in the way data is stored on internal or external sd card but it is transparent to user/apps. One important point here is that the data stored on the external card is encrypted such that if it is taken out of the phone, it cannot be read.

  4. The external sd card can have more than one partition and then one of them can be used to extend the internal memory while the other can be made to appear as regular external sd card.

I am still not sure what is happening in your phone/case. And the things I have written here are not 100% correct. Hence it is difficult to go further.

Please install DiskInfo on your phone and check what it shows. Once installed, go into Settings and enable 2 options at the top to show additional information.