Phone + 512GB SD as a viable backup option for a hard drive?

[Pawnless Endgame]

People quite often backup their phone contents onto their main PC.

My query is the opposite: is it viable to use a phone as an external hard drive when it's been expanded by a 512GB SD card? The data on my main PC only adds up to 220GB so 512GB (or 256GB) will be ok for my needs. Before now, I've been using two 320GB external hard drives, one on-site and the other off-site. By plugging in a phone via a cat C USB cable, and as long as it's viable, I can whittle my backup options to being just that phone which I carry with me all the time so can act as both on-site and off-site.

The phone is the Samsung Galaxy A70. Not got it yet - have just ordered it and will collect from the Three store this weekend.

What do you guys think? How will Android interpret an SD card that has hundreds of MP3 folders, hundreds of picture folders and thousands of txt / doc / xls / pdf / zip / exe files? Can the SD card be set so that it's hidden to Android but the PC can see when the phone is plugged in? That would probably make it simpler.

I guess a downside is if the phone gets nicked, then the SD card can be taken out and accessed on another device by the instigators. Can SD be encrypted?

 

[UnworthyBean]

SD cards aren't massively reliable and don't have the longevity of hard drives, especially if you're going to be backing up / changing a decent amount of data all the time.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you are going to be using this as your off site backup I'd strongly advise against it.

If you do decide to go ahead, the SD card can be encrypted but I believe it's tied to the device. So if the device is knackered, so is the data.

 

[MassiveJim]

Online unlimited backup is about £5 a month, just use that ?

 

[booyaka]

Amazon drive/dropbox/google etc etc

Wouldn't bother anything else - too slow. Just set your backup once a week whilst sleeping etc - job done

 

[TheVoice]

This sounds like a really bad idea. SD cards can fail, phones can end up wiping data, plus you're increasing the risk of loss or theft of your data.

 

[413x]

Couldn't you just use an off site sd card?
Why do you need to put it in your phone ?