[dmusicant]

My 520 of ~1 year has had problems with the USB connection that have gotten steadily worse to the point where it's nearly impossible for all my PC's to see the phone regardless of the cable I use.

Amazon sent me a new 520. The SD card has ~45GB of data (it's a 64GB card), mostly music but I assume that some apps are on there, WP 8.1 has been on the phone a while.

My data is through Airvoice Wireless, a $10/month plan, and I have their SIM in the original phone.

Someone said I should copy all the data etc. from the SD card onto an external device and reformat the SD card in the new phone, presumably before or after restoring apps and data from the cloud (in Settings, backup is on, so I assume all my apps and app data is on the cloud).

How exactly should I proceed on this? Why is it necessary to format the SD card in the new phone? Fact is, when I put the SD card in a card reader, my XP machines presently say the card isn't formatted. However, I just put the card reader in one of my Windows 7 laptops and it does see the card and can read the data.

Thanks for any guidance, help, links, etc.!

[Harrie-S]

Your card is 64GB and formatted as exFAT but windows XP does not recognize exFAT because XP is to old but with this updates it will recognize it.
Download Update for Windows XP (KB955704) from Official Microsoft Download Center
SD cards larger then 32GB have to de formatted exFAT because the old standard FAT32 can not format SD cards larger than 32GB.

Formatting a card in the phone gives the best change that you new phone can read the card.
But coping 45 GB will take some time but then you have a back up of your data.
If you however already have al the data which is on the card on your PC you do not have to copy it.
If you put the card in your new phone before you switch it on then the card will be formatted during the setup. (but i am not 100% sure) and if you use the backup then your apps will be placed back on the SD card and after that you can copy back your data.

Hope that someone can confirm my story.

[dmusicant]

I'm having problems. I did a backup of the old phone but when I start the new phone and sign into my Microsoft account I am not prompted to restore the backup. Instead I'm asked if I want to backup the phone. Of course I say no, what's the point of backing up this new phone, I haven't done a thing with it? This is nutty. I can't figure out how to restore my backup. Anyone, please help!

[jontyfernz]

I'm having problems. I did a backup of the old phone but when I start the new phone and sign into my Microsoft account I am not prompted to restore the backup. Instead I'm asked if I want to backup the phone. Of course I say no, what's the point of backing up this new phone, I haven't done a thing with it? This is nutty. I can't figure out how to restore my backup. Anyone, please help!

If you have the old phone take a backup of it and format it.Then restore the backup in the new phone

[dmusicant]

If you have the old phone take a backup of it and format it.Then restore the backup in the new phone

I finally got this working. I have been confused about all this because I seem to have two Microsoft Accounts. One has my ISP's domain (i.e. @sonic.net) and the other has domain @live.com. The account that my old phone was signed in on was @live.com. My email address is @sonic.net. When prompted to sign in after resetting the new phone I'm asked for an email address and I put in the @sonic.net. Therefore I didn't see my backup that I made the other day, instead I saw a backup I did to the other account back in July. I guess I understand this now, but before I was kind of befuddled about all this. Why I wound up with two accounts? I don't think MS intended things to work that way, but that's the way the cookie crumbled. Maybe I should delete one of the accounts, don't know, or how I would do that. Back in July, when I updated to WP 8.1, confusion about this stuff reared its ugly head. I was on the phone with MS support people for ~2 hours (stuff wasn't working as expected) and they never could figure out what was going on!!!

[RumoredNow]

You can incorporate the @sonic into your MSFT account via outlook by adding it as an alias. I prefer not to do this. I have a burner box at yahoo that I keep for SPAM type activities. I.E.: things that are one off sign ups and activities that will generate a lot of "Newsletters" and other advertising. I keep my outlook.com much cleaner that way and it is for personal correspondence and business.

On the SD card... You would only need to start fresh with any Apps & Maps that are stored on the card. If the card is just disposable media (pics, music, vidz) the new phone will read and index it when the appropriate App is opened and it scans for content. On the limited internal of a 520 I know it is impractical to keep all Apps on the phone...

I hope your setup continued smooth and you are grooving right along now.