SD Card Upgrade Woes

Purchased a 256GB micro sd card and finally got around to attempting to transfer all the data over from my old 128GB card. I put it off for a while because I know what a pain it is. It is also a huge disruption as basically my phone is unusable until the transfer is finished.

Sure enough, it was a pain. I spent around five days attempting to transfer the data and eventually had to RMA the card with Sandisk.

I did learn some things in the process however. What seems to work best to do a full transfer of data from one sd card to another is:

  1. Use a Linux machine to do the transfer. Windows is simply a PITA to work with. You do not want to use Windows Explorer for this task.
  2. First backup the data from the old card to a filesystem that is the same - that is, either exfat or ntfs. I tried transferring it to an ext4 filesystem but when I transferred it to the new card all the file timestamps were wrong. For photos that is a big no-no because the timestamp info is critical for gallery applications and for keeping your photos correctly organized.
  3. I prefer to use rsync, using the following command to back up from the original card, assuming you have an ntfs file system mounted under /mnt/ntfsbackup and the sd card mounted under /mnt/sdcard:
    rsync -av --size-only /mnt/sdcard/ /mnt/ntfsbackup/

  4. To restore the data to the new card, reverse the process:
    rsync -av --size-only /mnt/ntfsbackup/ /mnt/newsdcard/

The new sd card can either be formatted in the phone or under Linux using the command mkfs.exfat

After multiple attempts to save and restore the data I noticed that files were disappearing off the new sd card. That obviously should never happen. I submitted an RMA request with Sandisk and am waiting for a replacement card.

Another pain was that when inserted into the sd adapter that came with the card, the computer wouldn't recognize it. Fortunately I have a few extra adapters one of which worked well.

It's kind of disappointing that in the year 2021 it's still basically a pain to upgrade an sd card in a phone and preserve all the data.

Anyhow, that's why I didn't upload some of my last observations until today :-) On my last hike on Mt. Tam it was right after a rain cell had just passed over. It was nice to see a lot of plants budding out such as the Ceanothus jepsonii https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/69038875

Publicado el febrero 4, 2021 06:44 MAÑANA por fpacifica fpacifica

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