Sugui web

Trasferring files between Android and PC preserving modification time

This is going to be a short post1.

So, I've been using my old phone in a daily basis during 6 years, until this last month, where I switched to another phone. The old phone still works perfectly, but I was worried about it stopping working someday. Not only that, but performance and battery life issues were getting noticeable.

I had some image folders in the old phone, and I wanted to send them to my new phone. My first approach was the following:

  1. Connect the old phone to my PC.
  2. Transfer the files from the phone to the PC through Dolphin (the KDE file manager).
  3. Disconnect the old phone and connect the new one.
  4. Transfer the files from the PC to the new phone, again with Dolphin.

When I opened my phone gallery, the files where there, yay! But I noticed something, and is that the files were all unordered! All of this process overwrote the last modification date of all the files I transferred. So this didn't work for me, because I rely on this metadata.

So, searching a bit in the internet, I found a way that preserves this metadata using the adb command! So I did a second approach:

  1. Connect the old phone to my PC.
  2. Transfer the folders I want to the PC through the command adb pull -a /storage/emulated/0/<folder> ~/<folder>.
  3. Disconnect the old phone and connect the new one.
  4. Transfer the folders from the PC to the new phone, through the command adb push ~/<folder> /storage/emulated/0/<folder>.

So easy! This time I could see the images on my gallery in an ordered way. This can be very useful for other people so I wanted to share it here :)

  1. In my experience, writing posts for a blog was always extremely time and energy consuming. I always try to make long posts with a lot of content and explanations. So, many things I can end up sharing, are not shared because of the tremendous effort I didn't want to do to write in that moment. But it doesn't have to be like that. A short post is always better than no post. Also, as a blog reader, I tend to digest and prefer short posts than long ones. So write short posts for me to read, and make me happy :P↩