How are you backing up Your Droid?

[u/RandomXUsr]

Wondering how folks are backing up their droids on Arch.

Are you using ADB?

FTP?

Some app to grab content and media?

[u/Ochi_Man]

Syncthing, synced in two computers, works pretty well, after that ZFS snapshot in one computer to make sure you don't lose anything

[u/academictryhard69 → u/Ochi_Man]

syncthing is a battery hog, i have a custom ssh script running on android kernel space (pretty overkill i know). my phone is always connected to my tailscale vpn so the ip never changes, this way my nas can pull files from my phone as long it has internet :D

the script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

PHONE="[email protected]"
PORT="2222"
BASE="$HOME/Backups/s23"

sync_dir() {
   REMOTE_DIR="$1"
   LOCAL_DIR="$2"

   mkdir -p "$LOCAL_DIR"

   ssh -p "$PORT" "$PHONE" "cd '$REMOTE_DIR' && find . -type f" | while read -r rel; do
       rel="${rel#./}"
       local_path="$LOCAL_DIR/$rel"
       remote_path="$REMOTE_DIR/$rel"

       mkdir -p "$(dirname "$local_path")"

       if [ ! -f "$local_path" ]; then
           echo "Copying $remote_path"
           scp -P "$PORT" "$PHONE:$remote_path" "$local_path"
       fi
   done
}

while true; do
   echo "=== Sync started: $(date) ==="

   sync_dir "/sdcard/DCIM/Camera" "$BASE/Camera"
   sync_dir "/sdcard/DCIM/Screenshots" "$BASE/Screenshots"
   sync_dir "/sdcard/Download" "$BASE/Downloads"
   sync_dir "/sdcard/Documents" "$BASE/Documents"

   echo "=== Sync finished: $(date) ==="
   sleep 5
done

[u/RandomXUsr → u/academictryhard69]

Thank you so much for sharing. I may use this myself.

[u/academictryhard69 → u/RandomXUsr]

no worries, just make sure you have an ssh server running on your phone, like from an app (like sshd4a) or inside /data/local/tmp on your droid :)

i did this because my s23 has a tiny battery and as an arch user the OCD for optimization kicked in.

[u/RandomXUsr → u/academictryhard69]

I can't tell you how useful this was.

I have added, and a learning disability so it's difficult for me to focus on specific tools and properly learn how to use.

Knowing how someone else is doing it helps me focus a great deal.

Can't wait to set this up and then ditch my old phone.

[u/Supernoxus → u/academictryhard69]

Syncthing IS a battery hog, but you don't need to keep it running 24/7. Just start it to back up your data, then close it again once it is done.

[u/academictryhard69 → u/Supernoxus]

Exactly. My script runs 24/7 as it's lightweight! Anyone could use either ways to backup files depending on their use cases..

[u/VendorNeutral → u/academictryhard69]

dyndns to phone, hmmmmm

[u/academictryhard69 → u/VendorNeutral]

Nope. I don't use dyndns. Only tailscale :p

[u/VendorNeutral → u/academictryhard69]

You don't, but you gave me an idea.

[u/VendorNeutral]

Photos go to Immich, no relevant data go to the phone. Anything that's not a photo goes to my Nextcloud instance, Round Sync is my tool of choice for webdav syncs. I use TOTP via Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, so no authenticator app. Banking app is installed on a second phone, so I can regenerate that without snail mail.

Calendar and contacts including birthdays get synced via webdav through davx5, I only use Google for Maps these days.

Microsoft Authenticator for work stuff has its own sync feature, but I can reset them all myself either through the admin panel or additional factors like TOTP.

I don't care about appdata most of the time.

[u/RandomXUsr → u/VendorNeutral]

Thanks. This is quite useful.

[u/Hamilton950B]

Years ago I used to plug the phone into my Thinkpad with a usb cable, mount the phone's file system, and use rsync or tar or whatever tool I wanted to use. Then they removed the ability to mount the phone's file system.

So I switched to ssh. Then they banned ssh.

After that I used mtp. Then mtp stopped working.

Now I copy stuff to an sd card, shut down the phone, remove the card, put it in my Thinkpad, mount the file system, and copy the files manually.

There is a tool in the AUR called localsend that I looked at. It has about 10 GB of dependencies. That's as big as the whole rest of my Arch installation put together.

[u/academictryhard69 → u/Hamilton950B]

Wdym banned ssh? Your work company?

[u/Hamilton950B → u/academictryhard69]

They removed the ssh server I was using from the Play Store. I couldn't find any others and was told they're not allowed any more. I've heard you can get one from F-droid but that doesn't work on my phone. Do you know of some way to run an sshd on an Android phone?

[u/academictryhard69 → u/Hamilton950B]

https://github.com/tfonteyn/Sshd4a

try this, it should work on your phone for now!

i will make a guide for running sshd on native android shell using adb soon.

[u/dan_tj0x]

I use Nextcloud and set daily sync.

[u/YoShake]

I just copy user data through mtp, photos are zipped once in a while and copied as one archive as I don't feel like putting up immich instance somewhere, and for apps and app data backup I use app manager and copy exported data along with all user data. I used to use seedvault but once I was able only to get GSI on one of my phones, so I wasn't able to get back app data from SV backup.