💾Use the SD-Card

👑 Yap! You can move your entire Vault to the sd-card and free up all that space on your phone's internal storage.

How's that working?

Privary takes your entire Private Vault to your card and no longer uses your phone's internal storage. Sounds easy? Good! Complexity plays in the background as Privary uses encrypted communication with your sd-card.

Let's start

Select SD-Card storage from the Privary settings. The popup describes the required steps.

Quick wrap up:

  1. Once you are in the screen to grant the sd-card write permissions to Privary, first tap on the menu button in the top right. Select the option "Show external storage" and "Show hidden objects". If one of those is not available, just go ahead

  2. Open the menu from the top left and select the sd-card. It's marked with a disk symbol

  3. Do you see a folder named .privary? Just press on that and submit with the button at the bottom. If not, move to the next step

  4. Select the folder DCIM. Do you see a folder named .privary? Just press on that and submit. If not, without selecting any folder, submit your selection with the button at the bottom "Use this folder"

Done. Once you have selected the proper location and submitted, Privary asks you to proceed. This can take a few minutes depending on the amount of files inside your Vault.

Hint: Privary will no longer use your phone's internal storage once you've activated the sd-card option

Move back to the internal storage

Simply select the option SD-Card storage from the Privary settings when it's active to switch your entire Vault back to the internal storage.

Performance

The internal phone storage is faster than any sd-card due to it's technical nature.

However, using a sd-card with certain technical conditions makes the difference barely noticeable.

Choose a sd-card with:

  • At least UHS-II (defines the bus-speed)

  • U1, U2, U3 or V10, V60, V90 (defines the speed-class)

  • Buy quality - not cheap! Only from authorized retailers as there are many fakes and fake shops

SD-Cards have a limited life span due to their technical nature. Relying on a well-known manufacturer and buying from a trusted source makes all the difference.

We recommend the following manufacturers:

  • SanDisk

  • Samsung

  • Verbatim

Switch to a new sd-card

Quite easy as a simple copy does the job. Copy the data folder .privary to the same position on your new sd-card. You can use a Laptop for the transfer.

Reimport from the sd-card

Assume you have removed the sd-card. This may clears the write permissions for Privary. To import your Vault from the card:

  1. Open Privary and wait for 2 seconds on the login. Do you see a hint to import your Vault? Move to Apply write permissions. If not, move to step 2

  2. Login and open the Privary settings. The sd-card option is not active? That's okay. Make sure that the Vault you've logged into is empty as we are going to remove that to import your Vault from the card. Unlock files before proceeding if required.

  3. Select reset from the Privary settings. It's the last option in the list.

  4. Once Privary restarted, wait a second until you see the hint to import your Vault. Move to Apply write permissions to finalize the import.

It's not working for some reason?

  1. Turn off the phone

  2. Eject the sd-card

  3. Turn on the phone

  4. Insert the sd-card and retry

Important: The SD card must have been formatted by the Android operating system. If the card was formatted using a PC, Android may not be able to index it correctly.

If nothing helps please reach out to our team.

My sd-card stopped working

Not an issue if you have the Cloud Backup active or a quite current backup file.

If you didn't use any backup option, insert the sd-card into a Desktop Computer and see if it's recognized. Take a backup of all content, not only certain folders (Copy all files / folders from the sd-card to your computer).

Search the backed up folders for the pattern ".privary". That's your data folder and contains your Private Vault.

Which file system is recommended?

We recommend any but FAT32. For example exFAT. The issue with FAT32 is that it doesn't support single files with more than 4GB.

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