https://www.androidauthority.com/google-new-data-transfer-restore-methods-3440006/
Google is working on new ways to transfer and restore data between two Android devices. One of them is designed to speed things up.
Simple, include sd cards on phones and use usb 3.0 or higher..
(I say that as I am about to wipe my device with ~200gb data and then import them back again through wifi hotspot because wired transfer is slower than wireless and it doesnt have an sd card slot...)
USB Ethernet dongles
That's how I do it, though I put it on my NAS first for safe keeping.
I have usb 2.0 though, so it's gonna be slow ~no matter what😭. I get ~15MB/s on average and it can reach ~40MB/s with wifi hotspot, while usb goes at about ~6MB/s on average and can reach about 30MB/s.
The issue are the small files. Wifi handles them much quicker. Especially listing folders with thousands of files. Opening my camera directory (~8.500 files) with wifi takes about 5seconds, while with usb it takes about ~1-2minutes....
About nas, I would too like to have one and automatically backup everything there. I might build one some time.
I'm transfering data from my phone to an extrernal hard drive which I connect to my laptop. To do the syncing a bit more automated, I've written some WinSCP scripts. I create a local hostpot with my phone, I connect my pc to it and then I move files. (My phone has a dual wifi antenna which allows to have both the hotspot on and connect to my wifi, so I can post this comment without using data.)
The data I transfer are ~all sorts of types; Media files (either from my camera folder or various other folders), text or similar files (I also keep logs of the files on my device to help me restore stuff), encrypted files, backups of apps+data/phone settings/contacts/sms/calls etc. At the moment of writing this I'm transfering about 30-40gb to my pc as I slowly prepare myself for the factory reset.
My workflow is far from automated, but I've made a lot of progress since last year with the help of the scripts. It's sad though, because backing up and restoring everything now takes about 9hours, while with an sd card I could reduce it to something like half an hour... My next phone will probably be fairphone 6 or 7 in 2028 (now I have a xiaomi mi 10 running custom roms) if it has an sd card slot.
Got it - yeah the big hit is USB functionality for the external definitely.
Do you have sufficient laptop storage to make it temporary? Maybe even in batches?
I have about 25gb free out of the 1tb my laptop has, sooo not a good idea, plus it adds complexity. Well, I'll just improve my scripts and try to keep things tidied up so that it becomes easier. (Lol, now I'm post factory reset and I've started importing stuff back to the phone. Till tommorow noon everything may be set up.) Tnx for your interest!
As a side note, I've realized that transfering files from the phone to the laptop (instead straight to the external hard drive) makes the process a lot faster, compared to moving them to the drive directly, but still, I prefer the wireless transfer as I can sync folders easier and it's faster.
Yeah, if you had the storage I'd say use an Ethernet dongle on the phone, wire up Ethernet on the laptop (as long as it's not a USB 2 dongle that you'd need :) ), transfer over network that way and give yourself some easier transport than wifi....
But in your case, yeah wifi is the right call.
My workflow for reference, I've got a dock that supports 3.2gen2, so I connect my phone up there. I've got 1 gig on the dock, and I copy over to my NAS (4x1gbit in LAG), and with the dock having USB for mice/keyboard use it's easy peasy. Once backed up, new phone to the dock, and go the other way.
Most files are already backed up though, with the NAS and my self hosted services, so it's mostly a single instances backup and not much to copy back.
Please for the love of sweet baby jesus fix notification sound settings. How are silent notifications still hitting full ring regardless of settings? Am I hallucinating this issue?
Not to mention not being able to change the ringer for a specific app but being required to change it on every arbitrary type the app decides.