Most of the smartphone users prefer to use an SD Card on their phone because the internal storage provided in their phone will be not sufficient for them, thus most of their important files and private data will be stored on their SD card.
Now, most of the people want to protect their SD Card by encrypting it. If You are also one of them looking for a how-to guide which will assist you to encrypt your SD Card step by step then you are at the right place. In this post, you will learn how you can encrypt your SD Card in your phone that too without using any third-party software.
Why Encrypt SD card?
The only reason why you may want to encrypt your Android phone’s SD card is to make sure that no one will be able to access the contents of the SD card without unlocking your phone first.
Once the SD card is encrypted, it can only be used with a phone that was used to encrypt it. Even if someone removes the SD from your phone, they cannot read it as the SD card is encrypted.
By doing so, you won’t be worried about your data going into wrong hands even if you misplace your SD card. However, there are both pros and cons to SD card encryption.
Advantages
- No one can access contents on your SD card unless they have access to the phone that is used to encrypt the SD card and be able to unlock the device.
Disadvantages
- If your phone becomes dead, your SD card will be dead as well. You cannot use your SD card on any other phone without the encryption key.
- You cannot recover the data on the SD card without decryption which is only possible using the device used to encrypt the phone.
Now that you know the pros and cons of SD card encryption, here is how to encrypt your phone’s SD card.
Encrypt Your Phone’s External SD Card
[alert-note] Note: The SD card Encryption feature is not available in all the smartphones. For example, Xiaomi Redmi Note and Redmi series smartphones don’t offer SD card encryption. [/alert-note]
1. First of all, unlock your phone and go to Settings.
2. Now in Settings, scroll down and choose Security option.
3. Under Security, choose Encrypt SD Card option, to start the encryption process.
4. Now you must tap on Turn on option, in order to encrypt your SD Card.
5. Now on the next screen, a message will appear asking whether you want to encrypt your SD Card or not, tap on Yes.
6. Now on the next screen, it will again ask whether you want to encrypt all multimedia files, just tap on the Yes option.
7. Once done, tap on Continue, and now it’s time to enter the password. You need to enter a password of your own choice and then you need to confirm it.
8. At last, you just need to tap on the Apply option to start the encryption process.
9. Once the process gets successfully completed, you will receive a notification written ”SD Card is Encrypted”.
[alert-note]Note: The process may take some time to get successfully completed. The processing time mainly depends on your SD Card’s storage size.[/alert-note]
That’s all you need to do in order to encrypt the External SD card of your phone.
Decrypt SD Card
Note that, to be able to decrypt the encrypted SD card, you need to use the same phone which was used to encrypt the SD card. If you want to update your phone to the latest firmware, make sure you decrypt the encrypted SD card. Remove the SD card and then proceed to update the smartphone.
If not, the chances are that the phone might stop recognizing the SD card if you update it without decrypting the SD card before the update.
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