It feels quite surreal to write a post with such a title in 2025 but I’ve been recently given the simple task to folders of ~10-20GB of Camera galleries from Android phones to back them up to a physical drive.

Surely a joke at this moment in time, with devices in the GHz range and tens of gigs of RAM, right?

Well, no.

The device in question is an ASUS ZenFone with no apparent damage and completely functional (albeit feeling very sluggish). Memory is almost completely full and we need to copy pictures in the gallery

  1. First option is of course USB connection. Well, the MTP file transfer protocol is extremely slow, hangs up after a while and just very unstable. Tested both on Windows and Linux. Nothing really changes when choosing “Photo transfer” instead of “File”.
  2. Transferring over WiFi is paradoxically more stable, using “Quick Share”. Unfortunately this is limited to 500 transfers each time and requires a lot of back and forth to keep track what are you trasferring. No more than 500 files can be selected anyway in the “Share” dialog".
    • rquickshare is a Quick Share client for Linux. Works very well.
  3. Uploading directly to Google Drive has to go through this “Share” limitation as well, and there’s apparently no way to tell Drive upload this local folder to this remote one and make it “resumable”. This also requires a paid subscription to get more storage than 15gb. Very hard from the notification UI to understand what’s the progress as well. Why exactly we really reduced the UI of such an operation to a notification?
  4. KDE Connnect. This works extremely smoothly but after having some issues in exposing some other folder than Downloads, the mounted filesystem hangs out trying to access it.
  5. This guy claims 28x faster speeds of transfers with its own solution to transfer files in C# using adb. Unfortunately this is Windows only. But some light appears.
  6. Finally adbfs-rootless allows mounting Android phones on Linux with adb. Works perfectly. Now, with rsync I’m copying from the mounted Android filesystem to my local disk.

The transfer throuh adb is extremely fast, and 16 gigs were transferred in less than 10 minutes.

Now, set up rclone to upload those to your favourite cloud solution without having to deal with their inferior clients on Linux (not dropbox, dropbox on linux is fine).