Android 10 - MicroSD as phone storage

Help Fairphone 3
102

Hi I’m having the same problem, inserted SD card and selected option to use as internal storage and also chose the other option it gave to transfer some system files or something. Now camera is not saving photos and can’t view photos sent to me in WhatsApp. Fortunately my camera photos are all backed up to Google photos. I understand my mistake and the need to reformat SD card as external storage just not sure how to go about it. I tried to move the files from the SD card but it only gives the option to move to Downloads in internal storage? Is this correct? But then when I tried that it said the file ‘was not copied’ (I selected ‘copy’ instead of ‘move’ to be on the safe side). Can anyone explain step by step what I should do as I’m not very techy? Thanks

103

You should have an option to reformat as portable.

Settings > Storage > SD card

this will give an option to move files

104

Thanks what I mean is I’ve tried moving files as you have suggested but when I go to Settings>Storage>SD card then select a file, go to the three dots, Move to - it then gives me the option to move to Downloads (which I assume is in internal storage), but when I select that it says it Couldn’t move this item??

105

OK too busy to emulate right now, but will try later today.

106

Hey, annoyingly I have the same problem as others in this thread. I have a FP3 and also chose the option to move data to an internal common memory (“interner gemeinsamer Speicher”) and now I can not access pictures, download files or use my camera.

While it would be quite annoying to loose the pictures, at the same time it would not be the end of the world. But I would very much like to avoid losing other data such as banking apps, saved contacts etc so I hope to not have to reboot the phone.

By formatting the SD card (256GB from Sandisk) as external, will the phone work again normally? I am somewhat concerned about that as when in the list of contents for the SD card it says “system 59 GB”, which is too large to fit on the actual memory of my phone. Can I damage the phone by formatting as external?

I have also not quite understood how to move apps/whats listed as “system” from the SD card to the other memory?

Any help would be very much apprecciated!

107

There’s no likelyhood of you damaging the phone but yes you may well loose some data.

  • Try clearing the caches and storage of all the apps, be sure to empty the bin on any camera app.

  • try starting in safe mode and use for the day. This will disable all your custom apps but not settings for the default apps

Using in safe mode you can

  • See how you are coping
  • check the memory again

I don’t use google cloud for example, but many people back up to that.

108

Thank you very much!

How do I enable the safe mode?

109

Ideally you would search the forum, for instance

https://forum.fairphone.com/search?q=safe%20mode

The first result is

Then scroll down to the FP3 link and you will find a link . . .

I know searching isn’t everyone’s idea of a picnic but that link will take you to

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048843571

Which by the way was already posted in a comment above.

:om:

110

Sorry, I missed that and will search in the future. Thank you very much!

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