Note for Americans: here WhatsApp is the de facto communication standard. Literally nobody uses SMS/iMessage/Facebook messenger/signal. And carriers still charge 2 euro for a MMS which completely kills iMessage/RCS (if accidentally send MMS, it’s expensive)
I switched phones and instead of copying manually /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp I used the new feature of pairing via qr code.
Besides that’s a not very well designed feature (you need to start transfer on the old phone before logging in the new phone) because they really want to store unencrypted backups on Google drive, the transfer completed in a short time.
Maybe too fast, I was expecting at least one hour to transfer the 5000 photos 10gb, instead it completed in 20 seconds.
So I told myself, ok photos not transferred, I’ll just do that manually and directly put them in the photo archive on my PC rather than keep them mixed with all the “happy holidays” trash.
I browse the old phone to /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp and… It’s empty. Wiped clean after the “successful” transfer process!
Luckily I had set syncthing (the fork on fdroid, the one on play store doesn’t have access to whole storage) to have a full overnight backup! On my PC I still had all the photos, almost deleted too as I noticed that I didn’t set the “trash can” option
Conclusion: go to download syncthing fork from fdroid and have a safety net from mistakes like this
Signal sucks hard when trying to transfer between iOS and Android (in either direction). I lost years of chats, photos, etc as a result.
No, it’s not a feature, it’s a missing feature. When your backup and restore system only works sometimes, despite being set up correctly, then that’s a shit backup solution.
Also. Who the hell uses Ios?
Everybody who uses an iPhone. Which is a metric shitload of people. What kind of question is that?
I keep my Obsidian notebooks and several source code repos in syncthing and then have them auto-shared between all my computers and my phone. Its been a great system, all my docs I need are readily available on all my devices with almost no delay and no cloud needed. A little advanced configuration to allow local deletes and I also have all my phone photos backed up this way too.
When I travel, I use my laptop and phone on a little travel router, so they’re always networked together and syncing files. Definitely saved my butt a few times!
syncthing is an extremely valuable piece of software in my eyes, yeah. i’ve been using a single synced folder as my google drive replacement and it works nearly flawlessly. i have a separate system for off-site backups, but as a first line of defense it’s quite good.
And carriers still charge 2 euro for a MMS
I’m in Europe and I don’t pay for regular texts or MMS.
here all the plans have hundreds of “free” SMS but MMS are still 2 euro each even on the most expensive “all unlimited 300gb of 5g” plans
I have a subscription with unlimited calls, text, and data. I pay (converted to Euros) around 45 per month. I also have unlimited roaming.
i also have a subscription that includes everything, but the fact is that in italy, no carrier offers a plan that has even just 1 MMS included each month. Even the most expensive plan with the most expensive carrier does not include a single MMS.
1 MMS = 2 euro = imessage and RCS are dead
Interesting.
Android 12 with syncthing-fork from fdroid does not allow access to the /android/data folder.
I want to backup my downloaded podcasts and whatsapp, but it can’t do it.
Do you have an earlier android version?
when adding a new share, you press on the cog, then it allows to choose /storage/emulated/0
but without root it can’t access Android/data or /android/obb, it can only access Android/media
