[jocala]

Do you mean for ADBLink to work the storage has to be formatted as "portable"?

Please note that on my Android 11 TV (Hisense 55U68K) the option to format an external drive for use with personal files is called "format as removable storage". I think this is the equivalent to "portable" on my TV.

I actually tried that initially. But the Android 11 operating system was not installing apps to the external drive. I even enabled that "force to external" option in the developer options. But the apps were always being kept on the internal drive - with no option to move them to external.

The other option was to format the external drive for use with apps and data...which my TV calls "format as device storage". This gave me the option to move apps to external (and the developer option mentioned earlier worked as well). This is current format that Kodi resides on.

So are you saying in my situation ADBLink won't work to backup Kodi?

I don't think so, no.  adb, (the android debug bridge) utility that adblink depends on to "talk" to android devices, is only able to access "portable" drives. No way I've seen around this, sorry