How to move files from an Android Phone (Pixel) to a Windows PC?

Question

I'm having a lot of problems with this, and not found any kind of resolution in the last 2 years.

I would simply like to get the contents of an entire folder on my Pixel 7 Pro and move them to my Windows PC. I find various sites like this mention it, but in a really awful and non-working way.

• https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/2840804

Other sites just do variations of the above that got me nowhere.

The problem is that my Pixel is full, 253 GB used of 256 GB. All of my personal photos and videos are archived in Google Photos (at non-original quality, otherwise they would swamp my online storage), so I now want to move ~180 GB of videos and photos (the original quality) from my Pixel phone to my Windows PC. I don't really mind how.

My experiences with the File Transfer setting in Android are awful: I enable this setting, then open Windows Explorer and navigate into the phone, and then open another window in the empty folder on my PC that I want to move to. In Windows Explorer looking into the Pixel folder, I do CTRL+A and then CTRL+X to cut the files, then go to the Windows folder and do CTRL+V. It copies a lot of files, but it does not move the files, and the usage on the Pixel is unchanged. Then, it always crashes after a while, so I'm left with a completely broken situation.

Ideally, I'd like to mount the Pixel as an external drive (say X:) and just go into it and robocopy from there to the Windows PC (I get that it's some kind of Linux filesystem, but isn't there a way to just get the Pixel to completely synchronise a folder to my Windows PC?).

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Edit, thanks to @Gantendo's answer below, I got this fully working and just want to include all of the steps for anyone that might happen to hit the same need as me to fully extract files from an Android phone:

Firstly, probably good to make sure that the phone will stay awake / unlocked. For Pixel 7, this was at Settings > System > Developer options > Stay awake (This will only make the phone stay on while it is plugged in, it will still go to sleep when unplugged).

To enable file transfer, Settings > System > Developer options, quite far down is "Default USB configuration". By default, this is set to "No data transfer". The other options are "File transfer / Android Auto", "USB tethering", "MIDI", "PTP", and "Webcam". Select "File transfer" here to get MTP (Media Transfer Mode), or you can select PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol). I went for PTP as it is focused on photos/videos transfer as I wanted (possibly use MTP if you want other files).

Once I selected PTP, the Windows Photo app opened and started automatically indexing the photos and offered to upload them into OneDrive. I hit ok, and then after about 10 minutes, the connection falls over, just as I saw with Windows Explorer copy. I find that for both of these, the connection always seems to fall over, and, it will then be hard to work out what copied and what did not to determine what is left to copy.

Resilio Sync was a complete success though, even though you can see the connection go to zero speed at times, it always re-establishes the connection and continues the copy, so the copy completed flawlessly. I found the interface a little quirky though so here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Make sure that Resilio is installed and running on both the Windows PC and the Phone.
2. Go to the Windows PC and define the default folder / download folder to save the files.
3. Then, go to Resilio Sync on the phone and go to the Folders page. Press the "+" in the bottom right.
4. On the page there is a SHARE section ("Send Files") and a SYCHRONIZE section ("Create folder" and "Add backup"). Press "Add backup" and choose the folder to share (if in PTP, the selection will be limited, change to MTP as above to select more folders to backup). For the original quality photos and films created by my phones Camera app, select the "Camera backup" option here (which corresponds to the "DCIM" folder on the root of the phone).
5. A token authorisation link is now created, and you have to send that to yourself by email or other sharing option (which the app presents to you).
6. Go back to the Windows system and open up the authorisation link just sent in the last step and confirm it on the Windows PC.
7. Go back to the phone and complete the authorisation handshake. This is not immediately obvious, as you have to back out of the Folders page to the Resilio Sync app main page, where the Notifications will show a red dot in the top right, select that and approve it.
8. The backup will immediately start on the Windows side. Press the lightning bolt in the bottom right to view progress, speed etc.

Answer 1

While Windows displays the contents of mobile device storage in ways that look like "normal" storage, this is an abstraction, something to make things simpler for most people. You cannot "map" folders on mobile device to your computer or access these using normal file-movement command line tools.

Things to check:

• It is possible the cable you are using may have problems. Make sure the connections are firmly fitting at both ends, and that the cable is not obviously damaged or worn. Try a different cable if possible.

Your available solutions are:

• Use a third party tool, like Gantendo suggests in his comment. Resilio Sync a REALLY good tool actually, for ongoing sync or backup, but back when I used it, it works better for two way sync, and may require some configuring to get it to sync only one way for space-clearing backup like you want.
• Use PTP instead of MTP mode for the transfer. MTP allows you to navigate more of the phone's file system, but it could have issues in certain cases. Using PTP treats the phone like digital camera, and allows use of Windows' Photo Import tools, which are specifically designed for bulk transfer (import) of media (pictures and video).

However, you note you've already backed these files up to Google, which makes me wonder why you're trying to do this additional backup at all, or if you can just go to Google Drive on your computer and confirm the files are there already.