Anyone know anything about Media Transfer Protocol / USB connectivity on smartphones?

Every month I connect my phone (a Samsung A5) to my Windows laptop ( via the USB cable it came with) in order to move the pictures and videos onto the laptop to be backed up. This month, it doesn't work - the A5 is not discoverable by the laptop.

I always ensure that "USB Configuration" within Settings -> Developer Options is set to MTP (rather than "Charge this phone") but for some reason it simply isn't working anymore. Something must have changed within my phone software / settings, but I don't know what.

It's definitely not the laptop or the cable that are the issue as I've tried it with several and all have the same problem.
I've also tried all other options within "USB Configuration" but none of them make the phone discoverable.

I have tried using Samsung's own channels to enquire about the problem but their highly sophisticated teams of robots don't understand the nature of the issue, and no real person appears available to speak with. Thought I'd also try my luck here...

Does anyone else do this? In my opinion it seems deliberate - I feel like Samsung are trying to push users towards Cloud options for backup rather than enabling USB connectivity. It used to be that plugging in the phone to a PC enabled file transfer by default, then a few years ago this stopped working and you had to enable Developer Options in order to change the USB configuration. This seems like the logical next step but it's very user unfriendly!

Herdanos wrote:It's definitely not the laptop or the cable that are the issue as I've tried it with several and all have the same problem.
I've also tried all other options within "USB Configuration" but none of them make the phone discoverable.

It's possible it's the connection on the phone itself - my phone has no cover over the usb port, so it accumulates dust/dirt inside, and in cleaning it out I managed to scratch or otherwise break the data pins. It still charges, but I can't transfer anything over USB any more. Luckily it has expandable storage so I can just shuffle things over SD card instead!

For quick file transfer I usually send files to myself over Telegram, but you could use dropbox's free tier to shuffle files across.

EDIT: Your phone is unlocked right?

Why not just use Google Photos or something and have it go to the cloud?

I sometimes get this and it's usually resolved by a reboot of the laptop or phone. Also make sure phone is unlocked.

OrangeRKN wrote:It's possible it's the connection on the phone itself - my phone has no cover over the usb port, so it accumulates dust/dirt inside, and in cleaning it out I managed to scratch or otherwise break the data pins. It still charges, but I can't transfer anything over USB any more.

Oh this is probably the answer then... said phone was recently chewed on by a toddler. I dried it off afterward and there appeared to be no visible damage but it's possible that the pins were scratched during chewing / drying.