lg k20 sd card question

MicroSD cards do fail, and can do so in different ways and for different reasons. I experienced a master boot record failure (abrupt, complete death) on one lightly-used card from a reputable manufacturer after just a few months, which is the sort of thing this sounds like. Conversely I've another card that is still working after 8 years. So there's probably an element of bad luck here, but the truth is that they do have a finite lifetime, and so you shiould always back up anything important that's on them (actually you should do this anyway: even if the cards were bombproof, if the phone is lost or stolen the card is gone too).

Luckily for you it sounds like your photos were not stored there (probably because the DCIM folder already existed in internal storage before you did this, and so there was no reason to move it), though I cannot guarantee that all of them will be there (in principle there's no reason it can't extend the DCIM folder to the SD card if it's formatted as internal). If you were using it for app storage you may find that some of your apps are no longer available or no longer work.

Formatting microSD as internal will somewhat reduce their lifetime as storing apps' data on them (more than the apps themselves) will increase the number of read/write cycles and make them wear out faster. But these things are designed to cope with parts of the card wearing out, at least up to a point, so an abrupt total failure like this sounds like something more serious (hence my mentioning my MBR failure above). If the card was formatted as internal storage that means it was encrypted, so don't bother trying to recover data from it: you might find a tool that could recover something from a card in this state, but the encryption would make it a waste of time trying.

corvairbob said:

ok i have another question. i have on my phone a gazillion photos and when i connect it to my pc and then look at the k20 in the folder on the pc of the k20 i do not see all the photos i see on the phone. anyone know why that is? it seem i have backup turned on for google but i'll be darned if i can find that on google. so i'm not looking it the correct place. and i see that when i delete photos on the phone they come back so now to figure outhow to stop that as it fills my storage back up fast. thanks

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Are you also looking into the dcim folder?

corvairbob said:

when i plug in the phone i get k20 in the window folder, then i see internal storage, then i see dcim and pictures, nothing is in the picture folder, so i click dcim, then i get thumb's or camera, i click camera and get lots of pictures. but when i ctrl-a for picking all of them, and then go to the pc folder about half show up in the pc folder

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Can you actually view the pictures that don't copy to the PC on the phone? Just wondering whether they are really there, or whether some index is showing pictures which were really on the SD card.

i checked google and i have that gazillion amount of photos. so the phone must be sending back to google for showing me the photos in the google photo folder.

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If you use the Google Photos app and have it set to back up then any time you open that app it will start a backup to Google's servers.

They've actually made it harder to locate and download things than it used to be (you used to be able to see the photo backups from Google Drive), but while it's tedious you can download them from the Google Photos website: select the photos you want, look for a 3-dot button in the top-right corner and select "download" from that menu. It's the selecting that's tedious: I can see how to select all of the photos taken on a particular day, but if there's a way of selecting them all they've hidden it well (of course Google don't want you to do that, since selecting and downloading them all is the obvious prelude to removing them from Google...).

i have 4 photos in the gallery on the phone and in google. so i guess i have them saved in google, but i would like to get them on y pc for faster retrieval.

i can go to then google drive i now have pinned to the task bar and then flag all of them and copy them back to my picture folders. thanks

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