Issue with HDD Backup on Pixel 1: Photos Not Backing Up and Phone Overheating

[Arora-Sir]

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I understand you suggested connecting an SSD, but since I don't have an external SSD yet, I connected an HDD to my Pixel 1 instead. After following your steps and #2, the HDD successfully connects, and all of the HDD's contents are visible in Google Photos. However, the photos are not being backed up. Google Photos displays all the photos available for backup, but even after waiting for hours, the number of photos pending backup remains unchanged.

Additionally, my phone heats up significantly after about half an hour, causing it to crash and restart of the phone.

Please advise if the HDD backup should work, or if I need to purchase an SSD for this purpose.

[master-hax]

I have never had a pixel overheat when using an external ssd. Not even in 90°F weather when plugged in and backing up large videos.

Maybe your device is accidentally doing reads & writes to the internal storage. I have not tested with a spinning disk drive so can't comment on ssd vs hdd.

[Arora-Sir]

I have never had a pixel overheat when using an external ssd. Not even in 90°F weather when plugged in and backing up large videos.

Maybe your device is accidentally doing reads & writes to the internal storage. I have not tested with a spinning disk drive so can't comment on ssd vs hdd.

Then there's a chance of overheating because you're using an SSD and I'm using an HDD.

By the way, when opening the Photos application, it experiences elevated temperatures while retrieving all photos from the HDD. Does your Google Pixel 1 scan the entire storage and upload the content to the Photos application?

Because my Google Photos reads all the storage, i.e. gets all the photos in the uploading stage, but it never starts to upload and gets stuck there at the maximum number of photos and videos present in the HDD. 😤

[master-hax]

My understanding is that G Photos doesn't start uploading until it scans all the media and builds a database of metadata, thumbnails/previews, etc.

That probably takes a long time with a hard drive.

[xerloq]

I experienced overheating. I purchased a heat sink: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NVLMZNT *edit to remove amazon tracking

[master-hax]

its also possible your pixel's flash memory is reaching EOL and that is causing the overheating. i had the idea of mounting the google photos app data directory from the external drive as well, preventing potentially all reads & writes during backup.

[xerloq]

its also possible your pixel's flash memory is reaching EOL and that is causing the overheating. i had the idea of mounting the google photos app data directory into the external drive as well, preventing potentially all reads & writes during backup.

How would we do this?

[master-hax]

essentially one would bind mount some folder from the external drive over /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/

there are some additional nuances that should be handled like migrating the existing app data & making sure the gphotos app isn't running when the mount is being set up but i think it worked last time i tried it

[Arora-Sir]

I've tried this statement @master-hax: mount --bind /dev/block/sdg1 /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/

It is setting up Google Photos again. It is still heating up while setting up your photo library. I'll let you know what the output is!

I don't know if it's Google Photos that's causing the phone to heat up and crash, or if it's normally crashing due to some improper flashing of the ROM. Could this be the reason?

Every time I reboot the Google Pixel, I generally run these commands in Termux:

su
sh -c "$(curl -fSs https://raw.githubusercontent.com/master-hax/pixel-backup-gang/master/install.sh)"
cd /data/data/com.termux/files/home/pixel-backup-gang
./start_global_shell.sh
cd /data/data/com.termux/files/home/pixel-backup-gang
./mount_ext4.sh /dev/block/sdg1

I know after running the su command for the very first time, the curl command is not necessary.

Now, do I have to run all these commands and then, in the end, run the mount command that is mentioned at the beginning of the post?

[master-hax]

to clarify, we would mount /mnt/my_drive/gphotodata/ -> /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/ using bind or sdcardfs mount (so we can bind both locations at the same time).

/mnt/my_drive/ is set up here so you can either run those commands to set it up yourself or run the existing mounting script which will set it up for you.

your mount command should work tho i think, but maybe not if you run the existing mounting script first

[Arora-Sir]

to clarify, we would mount /mnt/my_drive/gphotodata/ -> /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/ using bind or sdcardfs mount

/mnt/my_drive/ is set up here so you can either run those commands to set it up yourself or run the existing mounting script which will set it up for you

Just to clarify, you're saying that instead of using mount --bind /dev/block/sdg1 /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/, you're suggesting to use mount --bind /mnt/my_drive/gphotodata/ /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/?

[milchalpenl]

It will heat to some level. It needs to index/maybe check hash etc (like repo owner says). If you think this happens then don't dump directly many TB of data. One could create 10 folders on external disk. Mount only one at a time wait for it to upload - then mount the next. That way GP does not have to index all million files.

[lightc786]

to clarify, we would mount /mnt/my_drive/gphotodata/ -> /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/ using bind or sdcardfs mount /mnt/my_drive/ is set up here so you can either run those commands to set it up yourself or run the existing mounting script which will set it up for you

Just to clarify, you're saying that instead of using mount --bind /dev/block/sdg1 /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/, you're suggesting to use mount --bind /mnt/my_drive/gphotodata/ /data/data/com.google.android.apps.photos/?

Would it be possible to mount the data folder using sshfs?

[master-hax]

Would it be possible to mount the data folder using sshfs?

yea you can use FUSE to mount the data folder. sshfs and bindfs are ready to use in termux. i created this repo because FUSE was really slow for me.