

Google has the same attitude about encryption for SD cards as they do for anything else: Security trumps everything. It's less cool when you break your phone or it has a hardware fault and you can't see all your pictures. It's really cool that SD card encryption can keep some creep who stole your phone from seeing all your pictures. If something happens to your phone and you can't get it back to a usable state so you can decrypt the card, the data is gone forever. If your phone dies, all the data on the SD card dies along with it. The same goes for another Android phone, even another Samsung brand phone.

if you stick it into your PC to copy music or a big video to the card, it won't work your computer will tell you it needs to be formatted. That means you can't take it out and use it in anything else unless you erase everything and reformat it. You can't see anything on the card unless it's inside the phone that encrypted it and the phone is unlocked. But the reasons why you might not want to do it are pretty compelling, too. Guarding your photos or anything else you've saved on the card by encrypting it is a pretty easy thing to understand and see the benefit.

Think about that for a second - the only way to see what's there is to decrypt it and that can only happen when you have your phone powered on and unlocked. Some programs store their data on the SD card with encryption enabled, but encrypting the entire card is the only way to protect everything in one shot. It doesn't matter what you have on the card or what anyone else thinks if you want to make sure nobody can look at what's on the card if you lose your phone or it gets stolen you have to encrypt it. The only real reason to encrypt your SD card in any phone is so that the only way to see what's on it is to unlock the screen. Looking for a good microSD card for your Galaxy S8? Check out our guide! Security is not convenient If you've waded through the technical words and terms that experts use and just want a plain answer, this is for you! We can try to remedy that and have a clear and concise discussion about SD card encryption sp you can make up your mind after you know a little more. There are both pros and cons to encrypting the card, and it's hard to get a clear picture when information is spread across many different places. We've written what you need to know about the Galaxy S8's SD card and how you can move some Android apps from the internal memory to it, and a common question that pops up (as it does when we talk about any phone's SD card) is whether or not to encrypt it.
