SD card as internal storage and factory reset

[cmd1031]

Hello, I'm helping a friend.

She has an HTC Desire 626. As the phone was only 8GB, I helped her format a 128GB SD card for use as internal storage. She is now going to upgrade her phone but wants to pass this one on to her husband.

If we perform a factory reset, as long as we leave the SD card in, we should still be able to use it, right? We don't care about wiping the data, that will be backed up to Google Drive and downloaded to her new phone. We just don't want to lose access to the storage space.

Alternatively, I guess we could just add her husband's Google account, then remove hers and not actually reset, but not sure if that will work perfectly.

Thanks for any advice you can offer...

 

[anon(10614692)]

It should be fine to use since it will not be internal storage and encrypted as per today's standards

 

[B. Diddy]

The Desire 626 was released with KitKat. Adoptable Storage was introduced with Marshmallow (2 full Android versions above KitKat), so it's highly unlikely that phone supports the ability to format an SD card as Internal Storage. You're just formatting it to be able to save files to, not to install apps to.

For a phone that actually does support Adoptable Storage, I believe that if you format a card as Internal Storage and then reset the phone, the data on the card is irretrievable, since you've lost the encryption key by resetting the phone.