how can i add a larger sd card (data transfer)

[Android Central Question]

I have a ZTE z828, which by design is kind of a piece of crap. It came with 8gb internal and an 8gb sd card. Everytime I add an app or upgrade one, i get to move it from internal to the sd card manually. So that poor 8gb card is almost full. So I bought a 32gb card, and labelled it the same filesystem name as the old card and then copied everything onto the new card. Didnt work. Didnt think it would. So short of factory reseting and reinstalling every single application, any tips on ow i can migrate all the data to the new larger card and have the phone recognize it?

 

[Rukbat]

Put the old card back. Move the apps back to the phone. If they don't all fit, move them one at a time and uninstall them once they're moved. Then switch cards and start installing them all again.

(That's one reason you shouldn't move apps to the SD card. If the card goes bad, you can't uninstall the apps, and you can't install the apps because they're already installed.)

An 8GB phone, these days, is basically voice, text and email. There's not much room for anything else. (Google used to warn about moving apps to the SD card. There are two reasons for that. 1. You only move small pieces of the app, not the whole app. Each piece leaves a link to where it is on the card - in internal storage. If the piece moved isn't much larger than the link, you haven't saved anything. 2. If the part of the app that saves its current state [all Android apps have to do that - if the app isn't in the foreground, and the phone needs the RAM space, it can kill the app - when you get back to that app, you want it to look as if it's been running all that time] is on the SD card, that current state gets saved to the SD card. The life of an SD card is measured in writes, and with an app writing to the card constantly, you can kill a card quickly. [Relatively - an SD card should last for decades - at least.])