With your memory card out of the camera, move the lock slider down into the lock position. Now that you have a bunch of important information (such as photos) on your SD card, locking it is the fastest way to keep it safe.

This is how the memory card operates when it’s unlocked. An SD card works in the same way, taking in more information being written onto it until there’s no more room to store that information. As you write more down, you take up more pages in the notebook until it’s inevitably full. Try to think of it as writing into a notebook. When the card is unlocked, any device can write data onto it. Most memory card manufacturers even have an icon saying ‘locked’ with an arrow to indicate on and off to make it easy.Īssuming you were using your SD card without issue, that means the memory card is currently unlocked. On any SD card, you’ll find a small switch on the outside edge of the card. Continue below for other ways to keep the files on your SD card as safe as possible. With that said, locking an SD card isn’t a guaranteed way of keeping your files safe.

That way, you can never accidentally delete or overwrite the files saved on the card. For example, if you filled up a card with vacation images, it’s a good idea to lock it after it leaves the camera. You should lock an SD card whenever you want to prevent the files from being altered. Why in the world is there a lock on SD cards? Don’t you want to save files onto them? Well, as it turns out, there’s actually a pretty good reason behind why and when you should lock an SD card. Ever since the first time I saw an SD card, I always wondered what the little sliding button on the side did.

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