Phone with encrypted SD card, what happen if the phone gets broken?

[Kharl]

Hi!

i have had two losses in this year, first i left the phone in the train, i luckily i had all my important data iin the pone and that was secured... all good there...

then 5 month later i broke my phone, the phone was instantly dead, but i saved most of my data because it was all in my sd card... it is more convenient for me to have the data in the sd card, but what happen if i loose, the phone could be secured but the card can be extracted and someone could steal my information, then i heard about encrypting the SD card,,, what i have heard is that encrypt the card so only my phone can read it.... and if the phone is locked, nobody could read what i have in my sd card even if using a card reader for a computer, RIGHT?

but what if my phone gets broken and i need to recover my data from an encrypted sd card?

also, is it true that having a encrypted sd card makes the data reading from the phone slower?, and installed apps in the card slow too

 

[anon(10614692)]

The encryption key is stored in the phone. Without this the SD card cannot be read. Phone breaks and your SD card data is gone. Apps on an SD card will always be slow whether encrypted or not. I don't believe encryption slows down your device.

 

[B. Diddy]

Since the encryption key is on the phone, then the data on the card becomes useless. As a general rule of thumb, never rely on an SD card as the sole storage location for important data -- not only can the phone fail, but the card itself is generally more likely to fail, since SD cards are inherently much less reliable.

I recall older phones could slow down a little if internal storage itself were encrypted, so presumably that was also the case with SD cards. Phones these days are encrypted by default, though, so it's hard to tell if there's really any impact any more (considering how performance continues to improve in general). Installing apps to an SD card will always cause a performance hit regardless of encryption because SD card read/write speeds are slower than those on internal storage. And because of the unreliability of SD cards mentioned above, it's not recommended to rely on them for app installation, since if the card crashes, the system may also crash, with ensuing data loss.

EDIT: Whoops, sniped by Galactic Zoo!