But (and this is important) I also make a practice of backing up anything I can't replace, like photos or videos of family and friends, online or locally on my computer. I do encrypt the SD card in my T-Mobile Galaxy S7 edge. I just grabbed an old slow one I had lying around until a great 200GB card goes back on sale. My solution? I only store photos and a few (very few) videos on my SD card.
You'll need to decide if what you store on the card is important enough to lose forever if it falls out of your hands, or important enough that you don't want to lose it when or if your phone breaks. If you're using the card to keep memories from your camera, this isn't such a good thing. If you're storing things like confidential business documents on your SD card, this is a good thing. Outside of the phone you originally used to encrypt your card, your only option to ever use the card again is to erase it and start fresh.
Because of the way encryption works, even using the same password on a different phone of the same model doesn't give you access - the actual key is that random number stored in the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) in the phone.
That means if you break your phone while the SD card was encrypted, everything on it is gone. Outside of the phone you originally used to encrypt your card, your only option to ever reuse the card is to erase it and start fresh.īut encrypting an SD card also has a drawback - you can't ever read the contents in another device. Head into your GS7's settings and find the Lock screen and security menu to do it. If you don't want someone who isn't you, but has access to your phone, to be able to pull the SD card and put it in another computer to see what's on it, you need to encrypt it.