How to encrypt the SD card on a Fairphone 3

My wife got a brand new Fairphone 3.
I started to get it working but when I get to the point were the sd card should be formatted I didn’t get asked where I want to use it as internal encrypted or external / removable sd card.
I couldn’t find a way to get the sd card formatted as encrypted and internal.

Could anybody give me a hint please?
Thanks in advance

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Go to Settings > Storage. You should be able to select the SD card there and I think you should get further options then, probably by tapping on three dots in the top right corner. Among these options should be “storage settings” (or similar), and after choosing that, formatting as internal storage. I don’t know if this meets your encryption requirements though, but at least this makes the card (normally) only readable in your wife’s FP3.

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“Formatting” is not the same as “encrypting” - it seems that Android 9 on Fairphone 3 does not have the possibility to encrypt sdcards as portable storage. According to this article, all modern Android phones will encrypt the data on the internal sdcard by default. The article also gives some hints no how to get the contents of the card encrypted using third party applications.
Not sure if this is true however for the Fairphone 3. Somehow on the Fairphone 3, the “adoptable storage” mechanism seems to be not standard. Reading on in the official Android documentation on adoptable storage. Perhaps we need an official reply from Fairphone 3 support on how the system deals with SDcards?

Found some more threads dealing with the same question:

As we have to work it will take us till maybe saturday in the afternoon, till we can have a look together at the phone to try out.

Thanks so far!

I could take a quick look into the settings.
I can only select mount / unmount the device (sorry, if this is not the correct term - the phone is set to german language). There aren’t any dots in the corner. A long press or hold on the device leads to nothing :-/

@johanbove
We want to use the card as internal storage and not to be portable storage. So this shouldn’t be a problem.

The phone itself came already encrypted (which is standard in this version of android I think). But as far as I can see, the SD card isn’t.
I will test this in the evening (removing the card from the phone and try binding it on the computer).

Have a nice day

Many Android OEMs seem to switch off this formatting option these days, and Fairphone seems to be one of them.

You might want to try the procedure from the second answer here

– maybe that work for you.

Best wishes,
Thomas

Extending my storage with an additional microSD card worked for me with the help of the adb commands described in one user link of your provided link. Thank you so much!

Welcome to the community forum.

Could you give the link which helped you here, so others reading along and wanting to try the solution can find it more quickly here?

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Hi, of course!
I followed following instruction successfully:


BR

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So for us, the “solution” is to remove the sd card :frowning:
I don’t have the time at the moment to play around with adb.

God job Google and fairphone … :nauseated_face:

I personally would definitely prefer a card that can still be read on another device in case that my phone becomes defunct.

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You may have good reasons why you want to have the SD card as internal storage.
Similar to @teezeh I’d prefer to have the SD card as portable and store all personal data on (encrypted) internal storage and store not personal bulk data (e.g. audio or video files or offline maps etc.) on the external SD card.

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