Android - How to upgrade / swap SD card without losing data and installed apps?
First, turn off your phone's radio by entering Airplane Mode - usually this'll be by long-pressing the power button and selecting Airplane Mode.
Next on your homescreen, press MENU and click SETTINGS (or navigate in your preferred way). In SETTINGS, choose SD CARD & PHONE STORAGE. Press UNMOUNT to dismount your SD Card.
Now remove your SD card from the phone and insert it into your card reader on your PC.
Copy ALL the files to a folder of choice.
Insert your new 4 GB card into your cell phone and choose to FORMAT it from within the device. This is the safest course of action. Remove the new SD Card and use your PC to move/overwrite all data from the copy of the old card to the new one.
Re-insert your new card into the phone and reboot so that the scanning of the card takes place.
When I followed the instructions of the accepted answer with my Samsung Galaxy S5, the phone would always tell me that the new SD card needed checking.
There seems to be a bug when you're trying to replace an encrypted SD card. Here is what I did to work around it:
- Decrypt your old card (before you remove it from your phone).
- Switch off the phone
- Remove the old card
- Insert the new card
- Switch on your phone
- Phone will detect the card and then complain about problems.
- Decrypt the new card. This sounds like a mistake but it solves the problem. Apparently, the phone remembers that the card is supposed to be encrypted and tries to access it with the old key. Since the card isn't encrypted at all, this will fail.
- The card should work now.
- Encrypt the new card. If you skip this last step, you need to decrypt the card every time you switch on your phone.