Advice on using an SD card as data storage

I'm currently using the UTFT_tinyFAT and tinyFAT libraries

That you got from where?

Typically, the arguments to the File::open() method define what happens if the file to be opened does not exist (it can be created or that can be an error) or does exist (open for overwrite or open for append).

What argument(s) are you using?