How To Copy SD Card To Replacement Card

[startac4]

I want to replace the SD card on my phone (LG K20 Plus) with one with more capacity. I expect in orderto copy everything to the new card I'll have to download the albums, music, pictures and document files to my computer, replace the SD card and then upload everything back up to the phone. Am I missing some other way to accomplish this?

 

[cwcheese]

does your computer have an SD card slot? all current era laptops and most desktop computers have such a slot.
you could buy a new larger capacity SD, insert it into the SD slot on the computer, while connecting your K20 via USB to the computer. then copy all the files from the K20 over to new SD, and afterward swap the new SD for the old SD on the phone.
this would preclude copying everything onto the computer; however, if you do copy everything onto the computer, it does create a viable backup of all the data in case of disaster. either way, you achieve the same result.

 

[The_Chief]

If I can add anything to the excellent response above, always-always-ALWAYS copy the contents. Do not move them! Many people make the mistake of moving everything, especially all at once... if the process is interrupted or a bit hangs up in RAM somewhere, it can result in all that data being lost. Forever. By copying the files instead, a failure in the process simply means you get to start over. And try to break up the copy into, perhaps, 100 photos at a time.

Once you have verified a successful copy, you can then delete the original files and full-format the old card.

 

[cwcheese]

Good point, Chief... I should have begun my answer by encouraging backup, am myself an old computer guy who does it by instinct.
Chalk it up to Senior moment ☺

 

[mikedt]

I want to replace the SD card on my phone (LG K20 Plus) with one with more capacity. I expect in orderto copy everything to the new card I'll have to download the albums, music, pictures and document files to my computer, replace the SD card and then upload everything back up to the phone. Am I missing some other way to accomplish this?

That sounds like what I did last year, when I changed from a 256GB to a 512GB micro-SD. I just put the old micro-SD in a reader on the MacBook, and copied(NOT moved) the entire contents off to the MacBook, then inserted the new micro-SD in the reader, and copied the contents to it, and then put it in the phone. I did format the new micro-SD to exFAT, rather than the default FAT32, before copying the data to it. .

 

[puppykickr]

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.nitroshare.android/

https://github.com/nitroshare/nitroshare-desktop

https://nitroshare.net/

This app will allow you to share the data between devices on the same wi-fi.

This will copy the files.
As stated above, do it in chunks.

I seem to have the best luck doing it in about 1GB chunks.

For music it seems to do best with 75-80 songs at a time at most.

You may have better luck than that with a computer, I have only ever gone from phone to phone.

 

[startac4]

Thank you everyone. Yes - I would of course COPY not MOVE the files to the computer. Too bad I can't do that with everything in the internal storage so that I would have a good backup of that.