hdusuensnsh just bought a pixel and am going to give graphene a go.
Welcome to the club!
hdusuensnsh installing graphene, and what is the best way to do it?
Follow the official installation instructions at https://grapheneos.org/install/. They'll walk you through the installation process step by step.
hdusuensnsh Does it matter at all if I do this before or after installing graphene
Installing GrapheneOS (GOS) wipes all the data on the phone. You'll have to do your data transfer after installing GOS to your new phone.
hdusuensnsh My question is how I should go about transferring data from my old Samsung to my new phone.
This depends on what kind of data you want to transfer. If it's pictures, documents or other app-agnostic data reachable by the file explorer, you can just plug your old phone to a computer via USB, copy the files onto your machine, and then copy them to your new GOS phone afterwards.
If you're looking to transfer app-specific data, things can get a bit trickier. If the app(s) in question is/are built well, you should be able to export your data into a file from somewhere inside the app itself, which then allows you to copy the app-specific file(s) to your computer via USB file transfer. Maybe some you use apps allow you to do a remote backup to their own servers which you can then restore on your new phone. Things really depend on the app(s) & data you want to transfer over.
If the above doesn't work, some apps might allow you to take a backup copy of their data via adb, but I'm not personally familiar with the method beyond knowing it might be a possibility. You'll have to search the forum & the web on your own for more info on this one.
And then the bad news. With some apps you might just have to cut your losses & install them from scratch on your new phone. Some apps (most often commercial closed-source ones) can & will refuse to allow the user (you) to copy or export their data onto another device. If that's the case, then there's nothing you can do. I know it sucks, but some apps are simply user-hostile in that regard.
If you have any questions about using GOS, just search the forum or post a question. We're here to help.