Hmm… I would say… this is not a very good error message.

Anybody want to give me advice on how to back up everything important from an Android phone? Assume I have about… eight hours and somewhere in there I have to sleep.

I guess I'm using adb, but I barely know what I'm supposed to be grabbing, also neither adb pull nor the https://github.com/jb2170/better-adb-sync tool google says to use is like… y'know… doing anything…

GitHub - jb2170/better-adb-sync: Completely rewritten adbsync with --exclude

Completely rewritten adbsync with --exclude. Contribute to jb2170/better-adb-sync development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@mcc about a month ago I was looking into the same thing and couldn't find a good solution.

I ended up adb pulling internal and external storage as a backup. Also used the export features from the apps that offered them.

@tsrberry can you elaborate what you mean by "a backup"? you just adb pulled the folders?
@mcc yeah I just pulled them!
It was more an emergency backup, since I was replacing the battery of my phone and was scared of messing it up.
I basically exported the settings and data of every app that allowed me to do it and then executed:
`adb pull -a /storage/emulated/0 /storage/path-to-my-sd ./`
@tsrberry Did you have root?
@mcc sadly not, otherwise I'd have just copied the whole filesystem or backed up the whole android ROM with TWRP
@tsrberry hm interesting. when i tired to pull any of the "interesting" directories it would just quickly hit a file it doesn't have permissions to and abort

@mcc I remember seeing error messages about that too, but I think it just carried on? I'm not quite sure right now.

Maybe you could also create a tar archive on device and transfer that? Maybe you could even stream it directly using `adb shell`?