Changing phones, or why not to?

I admit to knowing little about the technology. But I do download and upload a lot of photographs and videos.
Downloading from the internet onto the PC is not a great problem. I get sent a lot of videos via SMASH.
Uploading edited videos to the net to send to another piece of equipment via the internet is a nightmare. It takes 4 times as long as the download. It also drops out often. Software such as Smash cannot cope with this as it doesn’t store the information uploaded before the drop out and so you have to start again.
Google Drive on the other hand does store the information so you just reconnect and it uploads from the point of drop out. A 30minute video of decent quality can take 2 or 3 days on many internet networks whereas all the original material can be downloaded to your computer in an hour or so.
Outside of systems like Apple’s or Bluetooth etc
which are good if you have the matching equipment.
If I shoot on a phone or dslr with wi fi I up load it to the Google Drive 15gb free. I then download to my Macbook and directly onto my external storage discs. I tend to convert the images at this point.
To get photos and videos back onto my phone or someone elses I again go via Google drive.
You can set the system to do it overnight and reconnect automatically when the network drops out. I try when possible, other than for final edits to try to keep the files being uploaded as small as possible only possibly uploading 5 images instead of 10 at a time.
Uploading and downloading is much quicker on my old Samsung phone using 4g than through my home router. This might of course change when I finally get fibre optic connections. I will wait and see.
But by then maybe the 5g network will be more advanced in this area by then and that might be quicker again. The theory being that air is quicker than fibre because there are less gates to open..But what do I know? Sales brochures always look on the optimistic side.
As soon as I have done what I set out to do I delete everything from Google Drive to give me the space for next time.

@Mooney_Driver, I would usually sync all the contacts etc with Google (they have access to it anyway, if they wanted to snoop on you), and for other files I would would either save a copy on some cloud storage or save it on a memory card. For the new phone I’d sync the data back from either Google and/or other cloud providers and then for the rest of the data I’d use the memory card as well.
If you cannot use the memory card, then I’d just connect it via USB so the phone is pressent as a USB storage device (there should be a driver) and copy/paste the directories, just gradually, group by group. If it becomes a really slow copy, then I’d suggest contacting the support – you don’t want to spend a month copying the data back just to realise that the phone you’ve got is somehow defective. Or that there is a parameter that would make the copy a hundred times faster.

I don’t understand why avoiding google is worth the effort.

Your phone compromises your privacy only via your activity.

Google uses telemetry (Apple does too) but doesn’t know what it cannot get. For example it cannot get the phone’s number. That is why Iphones have to ask you what your number is, for the I-message feature to work. The phone number is held in the telco’s database; not in the SIM card or in the phone.

So all that google or apple are getting is some phone’s location. It’s like you run a share portfolio on some fantasy investment website. It doesn’t know who you are.

If you do not access any website then your privacy is greatly enhanced but then you have spent 3 or 4 digits on a pocket camera which does email and messaging

Messaging is also vulnerable to telemetry but I doubt google do that; it would be a scandal. The telcos store SMSs instead, for years or longer.

There is much more of course, like if you use your FB login to login to other sites (which most people do) you are uploading your Contacts to all those sites.

Peter wrote:

I don’t understand why avoiding google is worth the effort.

@Peter, that is precisely why I’m saying that I do sync my contacts – if there is a targeted investigation, your data will be extracted anyway, so it is pointless to not sync it. But some people would not do it as they say the privacy is exposed. Well, it is exposed when you start using your phone anyway – Google actually DID produce the software, so they can do as they please, and being an IT experienced guy and a realist I always assume that the moment I start using some software (Android in this case) I would not be able to say if my data was siphoned or not without debugging/reverse-engineering the whole operating system.
Hence – just sync it.

I’ve found dramatic differences in the USB file transfer from android between different versions of windoze.

XP was really bad and unreliable. Win7-64 is much better, win10 better still.

Often it is best to just extract an SD card and put it into a reader. Don’t use the phone USB cable.

yesterday when I tried it at home via 5G, it was lightening fast

Very unlikely to be 4G v 5G.

not without debugging/reverse-engineering the whole operating system.

A bit of a tangent but various vendors have been caught in the past doing “excessive” telemetry, because it is easy enough to see the data over wifi – even if encrypted you get an idea something fishy is being done.

We should be grateful for continuous telemetry; it is what shows traffic jams on google maps