Best way to backup data from my Android phone without rooting or using a Cloud service?

Mobile Tech Phones & Tablets
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I’m trying to disentangle myself from Google as much as possible. My current area of focus is backing up data from my Galaxy Note 9 but I’m finding a lot of websites that basically say “either use Google, another Cloud service, or manually copy and paste to your PC”.

The experience of connecting my phone to my PC and then navigating through a bunch of folders to selectively backup stuff… sucks. Surely there’s got to be a better way?!

Is rsync an option (perhaps using Termux)?.. it’d be great to be able to just connect my phone to my Linux box and start a script that would rsync specific folders to either one of my storage disks or to a target on my network / NAS.

It’d be nicer still to have the option to backup my data without the need to physically connect my phone to my PC. Perhaps Syncthing with versioning might be an option?

I’d like to hear what my fellow L1Ters are doing to crack this particular nut.

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Surely. There’s lots of softwares that can mount the phone’s storage. They usually want the phone and computer on the same subnet, and the phone to be unlocked.

I use KDE Connect, and it sets up a mount I can use rsync or whatever with. Despite its name, KDE Connect doesn’t require KDE; a Windows version :astonished: was announced recently.

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Syncthing?

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This is what I used to use. I used to have 2 synced folder in the phone. A one way sync of the phone to the PC and two way sync of a folder on my phone to my pc. I cut and paste stuff from there. This was when I have an android phone

Im currently running a Nextcloud on my iPhone. That is how i sync pics and large files. For smaller files, i use Signal and it syncs to my desktop client. I set expiry to 1 month. If i dont need it anymore, it gets removed automatically.