What is '/storage/emulated/0/' for?

[a cooperator]

Hi,

I have Samsung Galaxy Prevail LTE with 8GB of internal memory. There is no SD card installed although it is supported.
So, when trying to do a backup for any app, I was asked to save it onto "/storage/emulated/0/XXXX" where XXXX is the App backup folder or App backup file to be saved onto this path '/storage/emulated/0/'

For instance, when running 'SIM Backup and Restore' App, then when selecting 'Backup' option, I was prompted to save the backup to '/storage/emulated/0/SMSBackupRestore'

View attachment 125299

Thus, my question is as follows: what is the '/emulated/0/" path. Why was I prompted with this long path '/storage/emulated/0/SMSBackupRestore' as long as the App backup folder 'SMSBackupRestore' was saved onto '\Phone' root folder in reality.
I know that '/storage' indicates to the Internal Storage Card. However, I don't know to what the '/emulated/0/' indicates.

 

[Mikestony]

It's still the internal storage I believe, just a different path. Confusing to me anyway

 

[Hadron]

Virtual SD card. /sdcard points to the same space. /storage/emulated/1 would then logically be the real SD card (if any).

It's all historical stuff, and comes from trying to allow more flexible storage use without breaking old, badly-coded apps. But the consequence of that unwillingness is a messy system with multiple paths to the same place, plus the confusion of many users who think that /sdcard is actually an SD card.