Your questions might be answered as soon as the issue can be reproduced by Fairphone…
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I’m pretty sure this is due to statistics. If it happens - say - for one in thousand phones after using the SD card heavily for weeks (probably depending on a certain usage pattern) and Fairphone test it with one hundred phones, there is only a 10% chance they hit this bug. And that is ignoring the fact that testing a phone usually wouldn’t take weeks and there is just no way that Fairphone employees do all things that users do with their phones (combining the phones with all kinds of accessories out there). And maybe the SD card bug only happens with certain cards. I have no idea how many different card brands and models are out there but to test them all under all potential real world circumstances would take years.
As said before: I doubt this is possible (see above).
Yeah, I personally would be in favor of just removing the option, too.
Because technology is not magic but bound to the laws of physics, chemistry, etc.
Sorry, there just is no easy answer to this. Every data storage at some point goes defect. For flash storage, see for example Flash memory - Wikipedia
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thank you for coming in!
just one thing - it happened with the very first usage - i inserted the Disk, chose one option and the card took all the data and then it was lost.
Hi
I can imagine how annoyed you are, but my experience is different.
I bought the FP3+ in October last, inserted the sim and SD card and was offered no option to select if I remember. It was already formatted and had lots of data on it.
So I am wondering if the option asked you if you want to format as external or internal or just asks if you want to use it as external or internal…
If the question was of formatting then it would be clear that all the data will be lost. If it was not reformatted you may well still have the data.
I will try a new sd card and see what happens
thank you, too. it was not a question of reformatting, but the very first choice. I chose internal use. Then, unfortunately, there was no more choice, but the phone simply moved all apps with their data to the card.
Thanks
There’s another post on this today, so did you loose data just from the SD card, it looks like the post below shows data loss from the phone memory, in that instance.
I think your questions were already mostly answered by Ingo.
Just to add:
Well… That’s the thing. How can you tell how widespread it is?
There have been perhaps 20-30 users mentioning this bug on the forum. This is not a lot. And the forum is not really representative of the proportions of users who have the problem. Most won’t come to say it works, others may not talk about it on the forum, others may find out on their own the workaround of formatting as external storage.
This is why the best way to get it solved is contacting FP support, as they are the only ones which can act and get a real scope of the problem.
I would also be in favour of removing completely the option, but it’s not as easy as one may think, and some users may be angry about it.
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Do you have a work profile on your phone?
I wholeheartedly agree. Maybe Fairphone could at least re-arrange the options in the GUI so that external/portable/mobile storage would be displayed as the first and recommended option. If I remember it right, many users have reported that they set up their SD card as “internal storage” not for a special reason, but just because it was the literallly first option and they concluded that it must be the standard way.
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Hello, thank you, I dont know what this means, could you explain?
hello again, while we are here - an expert in data recovery has not given me much hope so far - the alarm clock function phone has stopped quite a while ago: is there a remedy for that?
if the alarm clock is a prior issue and therefore not connected it would be better to start a new topic.
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I read some days ago in a FP Group reg the new shift 6mq that Android wants SD cards to be integrated and user should not be able to choose how to use the SD card and that there are known issues connected to Android 10…not exactly sure what this means, but I’m pretty sure FP has not much influence and when they still try to provide the external option it might cause more issues in the future and might be the reason why the internal formatting is given as first option when setting up the card…
Where did you read that?
That’s more than a little concerning if true, by Android I interpret that as Google ~ not allowing me to use my SD as desired ~ I’m not swallowing that ~ 
I can’t help myself but unless given a reliable source I’d treat that as a rumor.
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It may be useful for users to read this:
Especially, since the internal storage option is meant to tackle problems with phones, that are low on internal storage. And that - nowadays, with phones running Android 10 - is much less likely to be the case.
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@BertG
Which does support the idea that the option to use as internal storage would ideally be greyed out and there being an option to enable it with a warning.
Saying that FP doesn’t exactly have a ‘large’ storage 
but 64G maybe enough for most users if they don’t store tons of music and videos.
My preference is always to store personal data ind, music and images etc. on a removable SD card
Hello again - a small update: we have given the mini-SD card to an expert to try recover any data possible. The phone now says it has no internal storage at all, so it cannot save any new media. This strikes me as weird, too - no?