How do I move data from one SD card to a new one?

mobarger

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Feb 18, 2015
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Replacing SD card

I am moving to a larger SD card. I thought I could just mount old one to my computer, copy files, and then insert new one and copy files over there. When I insert the old one, I know that 63GB of 64GB is used; however to my Mac it's only 14MB full. o_O
So obviously when I copy files over, I am missing quite a bit.

Is there a trick to migrating data from old card to new card? Google is failing me now. Thanks!
 

Rukbat

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Re: Replacing SD card

If you're running apps from card, they won't be transferred because a) they're not files listed in the directory and b) they wouldn't work anyway, since what's important is where they are, physically, on the card. That could be the entire difference if you had a lot of apps moved to the card.

Otherwise, it depends on how you moved them. If you were plugged into a USB hub and moved a large amount of data at once, most hubs can't handle that. The computer will report the files moved, but they won't be.

The trick is patience. Create a folder on your hard drive. Copy the entire card to the folder. Switch cards. Copy the everything in the folder to the card. Connect the cards to a card reader connected directly to a port on the computer, not through a hub. Have a good book to read - transferring 63GB even with USB 3.0 is going to take a long time. Copying them back to the new card will take even longer. (Writing thruput is nowhere near as fast as the burst write speed the card is rated at. The difference in a hard drive is slight, with an SD card it's great.)
 

SpookDroid

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Re: Replacing SD card

If you look at the contents of your SD Card IN YOUR PHONE, do you see 63GB of it being used? Unless there's a partition formatted for Mac in the card, you should be able to just copy/paste the contents of it in your computer.

Just remember that for the card to be read in your phone, it has be formatted as ExFAT. If for some reason there's a second partition formatted as something else, that might be why your computer is 'seeing' one thing while the phone is looking at another.

And nope, it's not Google's fault. It's how formats work.
 

mobarger

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Re: Replacing SD card

I am mounting the card directly to mac using an adapter, no usb. When I do "Get Info" it is much smaller. Indeed, the phone displays it is near capacity.
Copying contents from old and pasting them to new does not work. The new card is formatted ExFat.
I was blaming Google on not showing me the results I wanted - nothing else :)
 

mobarger

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Re: Replacing SD card

Well I tried switching to Windows8. Mounting tablet over USB gives no better sd card access than it did with the mac.Kies3 isn't working for this task.
Back to the mac, I could make a disk image of the old sd card and restore it to new card using disk utility, but it was restored formatted as the same size as the old card. :(
 

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