If you are looking for a way to move the photos, videos, screenshots, movies, music or any type of media file currently saved on your Sony Xperia Android 4.2 smartphone and put them onto a memory card then you have come to the right place. This guide shows step by step instructions, with pictures, using a Sony Xperia M dual cell phone running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and will demonstrate how to move files from a Sony Xperia 4.2 Android phone to its memory card without the use of a computer. All you need is a charged cell phone and a memory card.
This guide is the perfect solution if you need to backup your Sony Xperia before performing a factory data reset. Since all of the user data on an Android cell phone gets erased after doing a hard reset you’ll want to make sure to always backup your Sony Xperia first and often one of the best places to backup your information is your memory card.
This is also the perfect guide for a person who would simply like to know how to copy specific files to their memory card from their Sony Xperia M dual or Sony Xperia Android 4.2 smartphone.
The first thing that you are going to want to do is make sure that your memory card is communicating with your phone properly. If your memory card is not mounted or communicating with your Sony Xperia properly then you will certainly have issues moving or copying files to or from that memory card.
Start by finding the files you want to copy
Locating media files saved on your phones storage: Quick instructions
Locating media files saved on your phones storage: Detailed instructions with pictures
And then
Note: the “File Commander” application may not be pre-installed or available by default on every Sony Xperia cell phone. If you search your list of applications and cannot locate the “File Commander” app then you might have to look into downloading a third party application from the Play Store in order to help you move your files to or from the SD card. Just do a search on the Play Store for “File Manager” and you will have many different applications to choose from. One of my favorites is the “Astro File Manager” but you can also choose to download the “File Commander” app as it too is very user friendly and doing so will allow you to to follow along with this guide.
DCIM – this is commonly the default storage location for photos taken with the camera of an Android smartphone, and is often, in my opinion, the best place to start when transferring files from an Android phone to its SD card.
Images – much like the Pictures folder and should display most of the images and photos which are stored to your Sony Xperia.
Music – often contains music downloaded to your cell phone. Note: if you are using a third party app to download music to your Sony Xperia then the music files might be stored in a different folder other than the Music folder. If this is the case then I suggest looking for the name of the application that you used to download music as the files are most likely stored in a folder named after that app.
Now that you know how to locate the files saved on your Sony Xperia it’s time to actually transfer them to your external memory card.
Select Image(s) > Copy > Back > Sdcard1 (or whatever the external storage is labeled) > Paste
Open the folder that you would like to transfer your file(s) from. In this example I am going to choose to copy from the Images folder.
I have seen a few cases, especially when transferring multiple files, where the Cut option has been used, something happened during or between the transfer and a loss of data occurred. Where pictures didn’t get moved over properly and unexpectedly vanish without a trace.
After you have copied the image(s) that you want to put onto your SD card you’ll need to tell the phone where you want to put them.
In this example it is labeled as Sdcard1, so we are going to open this option to access our Sony Xperia’s memory card.
You will then see a list of folders containing all of the files on your memory card.
At this point anything that you copy, cut, move, or add to this Sdcard1 folder, or any of the folders within this folder, are going to be saved onto your memory card.
Don’t forget to check
Once you have confirmed that they’re all safe on the memory card you can go to the originals and delete them from the phones internal storage. If you have a lot of files that you need to erase then don’t forget the “Select All” feature.
That is how you can move files from a Sony Xperia phone onto its memory card
Don’t forget to check and make sure that your Sony Xperia’s camera is setup to save its pictures directly to the memory card as well. Then you won’t have to worry about constantly transferring files to your memory card. As soon as you take a picture with your phone it will save directly to the SD card. If you are unsure how to do this then you might find How to change the cameras default storage location to the SD card on a Sony Xperia smartphone helpful and informative as well.