Here’s some notes I took to get my Nothing Phone 2 to work with Windows 10. It is pretty standard for nothing to work these days, Android/Google blame Windows, Windows blame Nothing, Nothing blame Android. It should just work but it doesn’t. The phone file system is not mapped as a mass storage device class when plugged into a Windows PC, that’s where most of the problems stem from.
Anyway here’s a screenshot I took. It was late and didn’t write down all the steps but it is eventually possible to get it working if you have enough hair left to pull out.
Oh and it’s quite pointless anyway as Nothing Phone 2 is only USB2.0 so copying 512GB can take anywhere from 5 years to 1 eon.
Use a file sync software application like FreeFileSync to resume copying whenever it invariably stops. Try keeping the phone active and don’t copy thumbnail and system folders as they take an eternity to copy (like 1 file every couple of seconds).
https://freefilesync.org/
Another option is to try ADB File Explorer, it is fast at copying but I find it almost always fails for multiple files. It is probably the fastest method while it works. You don’t need root access for your own files, just system files which I don’t need to backup.
I used a mixture of FreeFileSync and ADB File Explorer to get a copy of what was on my phone and then use FreeFileSync to do an incremental backup weekly or bi-monthly which only takes a couple of minutes.
Hope this helps somebody.
