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What I'm looking for is an efficient way to back up my phone's SD card (Galaxy S4). In an ideal world* I would plug in the phone and it would automatically fire off a synctoy or robocopy task or something along those lines, one-way syncing the entire SD card with a backup directory on the PC.

If the automatic firing isn't possible, I would settle for a shortcut I could stick on my desktop to fire the sync. It would be nice if it were a true one-way sync (mirror) though as opposed to simply a copy, since it's a waste of time and resources to be constantly copying over existing files to make sure I have everything, and the only alternative at the moment is to manually remember and copy over what's changed.

Part of the problem is that while I can browse to the device in Explorer via Computer\Device Name, I don't know how to reference that on the command line. (And the synctoy gui refuses to accept it.)

*Actually in an ideal world it would continuously sync wirelessly, but while possible (via foldersync and owncloud for example) it takes forever.

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  • And yes, this isn't strictly necessary. Google Play keeps track of what apps I've installed, I cloud sync my pictures and music, etc. Everything else is replaceable. But SD cards can die, and if mine does, I'd really like to be able to just slam the identical data onto a new one and be up and running in 1 minute, rather than dealing with a bunch of disparate sources. May 26, 2013 at 6:50
  • did you find a solution for that? I have exact the same Problem and went the same way so far...
    – Max
    Sep 22, 2014 at 16:43

1 Answer 1

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Looks like the best option in my particular case is to manually copy everything over to 'seed' the backup directory, then use the Foldersync with an SMB share to keep it in sync. Foldersync over sftp might even be an option; haven't tried it yet. WebDAV to owncloud is way too slow.

One thing I noticed is that the local copy skipped files which are hidden in Android, so as well as being nicely automated once set up, this approach catches those additional files.

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  • did you find a solution for that? I have exact the same Problem and went the same way so far...
    – Max
    Sep 22, 2014 at 16:42
  • I'm still doing the wireless sync with foldersync over wifi. Works well for me. Sep 23, 2014 at 18:17
  • I also would really like to be able to use robocopy to backup my phone. Wonder how much the Windows development would be to write an app that can run from the command line to do robocopy style stuff. Someone mentioned here about some Samba connection to get it done for this Android as mounted as an MTP device.
    – jxramos
    Jan 5, 2017 at 6:38

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