kulesz.me

Motivation If you ever tried using a flash drive (such a SD, microSD, USB drive or CF) for your root or home filesystem on a small computing device or smartphone, you probably have noticed that flash cards are in most cases a lot slower than integreted eMMC flash. Since most filesystems use 4k blocks, the random write/read performance using 4k blocks is what matters most in such scenarios. And while flash cards don’t come close to internal flash in these disciplines, there are significant differences between the models.

Motivation I was looking for a simple way to backup data on rooted Android devices directly to a device running GNU/Linux connected over a USB cable (in my case, a desktop computer). In the following, I describe two ways how this can be accomplished.