You already said you’re willing to give up the headphone jack. That’s a good start, since there’s fewer and fewer models being manufactured with it every year. May I recommend you give up the sd card slot as well?
Straight out the gate: sd cards suck and will betray you at the worst time. It’s not their fault, they’re possibly the only kind of storage you can still buy that doesn’t have a controller. Just raw doggin blocks through a set of spring contacts in a high vibration environment. Into a flash with no over provisioning capability.
But you’re using it as a backup. That’s no good! It’s like using a spinning hard drive as backup but then shaking it around and fucking with the cable while it’s doing its thing (it’s actually worse because the ata standard has a bunch of ways of dealing with that, the drive itself has a cache and the ability to say “woah there, hold up” to the host and is overprovisioned so it can silently automatically deal with bad or damaged blocks.)
If you can, back up to something else instead and verify your backups. If you got a computer you can use it, you could also use a cloud service or something. It still feels weird to call something as simple as sftp a cloud service but whatever.
Good luck.
i swear i’m not saying this to chastise you, but not every day and two months is a big gap. if you don’t want to spend the cash for phones with sd cards that are supported by lineage and backing up to pc every couple of days isn’t feasible, why not use a usb storage doohicky to back it up? you can get an m2 usb enclosure cheap nowadays and they’re small enough to fit into a pocket.
those m2 drives have all the stuff that most sd cards don’t and they’re cheap as heck.
i hesitate to recommend a usb flash drive as a good backup option because they sometimes suffer from all the problems of sd and there’s been an identity crisis going on with them for the last few years.
another option is some kind of cloud backup. most people trying to degoogle are wary of cloud services but there is proton’s thing, others that i’m not really keeping up with and hosting your own, which could be as simple as sftp to your trusty computer at home with key based auth and a high port forwarded on the router.
you don’t have to give up every single feature that used to be considered a basic necessity. you are choosing to. between the sd, price, age and lineage support (and you want it to be good lineage support, not some one off mess), you have set a very high bar.
i know that you said sd never caused you a problem before. that’s great! it’s not a very good idea to rely on sd as a storage expansion though for all the reasons i already mentioned.