Well that’s interesting, and it certainly isn’t what I find digging around backup info on the internet.
Plus there are apps which need to be sideloaded e.g. Oziexplorer. Or anything else which didn’t come via the appstore.
Yes, data in the file system is not stored that way but that is a rather rare thing to have nowadays. In your OziExplorer case, you’d have to store that data somewhere else as a backup but it rarely originates from the phone anyway.
If I lose my phone today, I would lose exactly nothing in terms of data. I make sure all data creating/storing services I use have a cloud sync feature.
Peter wrote:
Apple deal with this by keeping track of all your IOS devices and allowing IIRC five reinstalls.
That’s not right. Apple allow you to re-install apps on as many devices as are registered to your account, simultaneously or sequentially. There is a limit of 10 devices at once on your account, but you can remove them whenever, so unless you’ve got more than 10 iPhones and iPads it’s not an issue. The limit of 5 relates to DRM’ed iTunes content, like songs and videos.
I’m not sure there is a limit (or if there is, it isn’t enforced). I’ve got 600+ devices all logging in using the same iTunes store credentials. We only use free apps though.
Perhaps they only care about paid apps?
That’s more than likely true. Why should they care about free apps?
I can report one very positive experience. Last night I tried to buy Tomtom GO (the new seemingly worldwide one, with an “interesting” price structure of 50 free miles per month, or £35 per 3 years for unlimited 
) The purchase (paypal payment) kept failing with “suspicious transaction”. I recall having this before on the Samsung tablet and somehow solved it on that. Anyway, reinventing the wheel is the world’s second oldest occupation and this issue is all over the internet, and some googling turned up this site with the 855… US phone number. So I called it (VOIP, $0.01/minute, on my Nokia) not expecting anything, but I got right through to an extremely pleasant and helpful lady at google who knew “everything”, worked through it “with her team”, and sorted it out. Almost no rubbish was asked for from me (a UK firm would have wanted my father’s middle name etc) because it was obvious who I was from the context. A rare positive experience on the internet, and it’s interesting that google have obviously made a policy decision to offer a level of customer service which nobody else I know gets anywhere near. And this is supporting a “free” program (Android, with its cheap apps), not paying advertisers (like me at work, £600/month, and yes we get a good phone number from google for that one, as one would expect).
One funny thing I found. You can set up the device to upload all photos to dropbox (only if on wifi, optionally). But this is only one-way. So if you take a pic which is really crappy (or compromising 
) it will be up there, visible to anybody who has the URL to that DB folder. Deleting it in the camera, or in Gallery, doesn’t delete it from DB. To get rid of it you have to start the DB app and delete it there, and be online for a bit. Only an anorak would be looking out for this sort of thing, so I can see a lot of people having a whole lot of “fun”
No luck setting up Csipsimple VOIP for Didlogic… too many ways to get it wrong. Keep getting “authentication error”.
Peter wrote:
Deleting it in the camera, or in Gallery, doesn’t delete it from DB
You have to use Google Drive or possibly also OneDrive will work. With Google Drive you can delete on the phone and it will be deleted all over, at any device and vice versa. All my photos are uploaded to both google drive and onedrive (don’t actually remember why I also use OneDrive…) I can’t see anything useful with DB, other than perhaps shearing, but why would you share photos indiscriminately?
