External USB Storage

Status of keeping the library on an external drive.

Not supported yet. Nothing on this page has been tested. It records what’s known so far for anyone who wants to help — see Contribute.

Large collections can outgrow a device’s internal storage. Whether an external drive can hold the library depends on the device, its USB-C support, the drive’s filesystem and Android’s storage permissions — so there’s no single answer that works everywhere.

What’s known

• Android: Termux reads shared storage after termux-setup-storage. Android only lets apps write to removable drives in limited, app-specific locations, and USB drives come and go. The installer accepts a different content folder through the RTW_CONTENT environment variable, but no removable-storage setup has been verified.
• macOS: external drives mount under /Volumes/ and are ordinary folders, so pointing the library at one is likely to work. It hasn’t been tested yet.

Maintainer TODO

• Test content/ on an external drive on macOS and document the steps.
• Test RTW_CONTENT with an SD card and a USB-C drive on Android.
• Document which filesystems (exFAT, FAT32, ext4) work on each platform.