I have a Surface Pro 4 with a 256 GB SSD and I am running a couple of virtual machines for development purposes. Each time I snapshot them it uses more storage and I am running low on space.

To increase the storage space I have purchased a 128 GB Kingston MicroSD card these come in a variety of prices and I am sure that the cheapest would be fine for movies and other bulk content. However I will also use this card in my Panasonic DMC FZ-1000 camera and so I bought the most expensive.

I hope that the read-write speed of this Class 10 U1 3 device will mean that I can put games such as Ark Survival Evolved and virtual machines on the card and they will work well.

Having got the card I have to decide on the backup strategy. The simplest choice would be to format it NTFS and mount it into my OneDrive folder using Disk Manager. This would enforce cloud backup and mean that my standard File History strategy of backing up to a local NAS will apply. The disadvantages of this are,

• I would have to format the card to exFat again before I could use it in my camera.
• I don’t want virtual machines constantly backed up by the OneDrive sync client (I could un-tick this folder in OneDrive > Settings)

I think that simplicity wins out. OneDrive should be the single point of truth for all data.

— update 2016/02/18  —

I found that I did not need to format it as NTFS to mount it at C:\Users\james\OneDrive\MicroSDCard. So I seem to have the best of both worlds. A card I can use in my camera (hopefully it won’t write over all the other files!) and in my Surface.

This did not actually sync with OneDrive online, I had to reformat it NTFS.

— update 2 —

At some point during the day the NTFS formatted MicroSD card “unmounted” itself from its location in C:\users\james\OneDrive. I don’t know when or how.

exFAT performance is similar to or better than NTFS so I decided to reformat the card to exFat but my camera could not format the NTFS formatted card. I downloaded the official SD Card association formatting tool for my Surface and this did the job.

I have admitted defeat today and will simply use the MicroSD card as D:. I will back it up with an occasional GoodSync job.