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Does Android have a "total backup" option?

If you select to delete the eMails from the server – how can you blame Apple for that? I really don’t understand. If it’s so important for you to have all old eMails why do you not keep or archive them? Of course with all kinds of operating systems you can get yourself into a bad position if you’re not careful what you do …

This issue isn’t really anything to do with emails. It is whether data belonging to an app gets backed up.

There is a lot of detail involved (which I don’t know but e.g. Stevelup does know) and it depends on how the app stores the data.

What this thread shows is that there isn’t a Trueimage-like image backup – for either IOS or Android.

And there are fairly obvious reasons for that… it would be possible only on a jailbroken device, and it would enable device cloning and thus software piracy. The whole way the ecosystem the app shop stuff has been set up hangs on people not being able to do that.

Trueimage is a fantastic program for Windows which (with certain caveats like making sure your SATA controller is supported) works absolutely 100%, and with the more recent versions you can even “unpack” individual files from the backup (which is normally heavily compressed). There is even an Android app which can unpack the files, but which doesn’t seem to do anything else. But Trueimage allows you to clone a computer 1000 times, with 1000 copies of the same software… with great power comes great responsibility!

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Flyer59 wrote:

If you select to delete the eMails from the server – how can you blame Apple for that?

My emails are only deleted from the email server after the Ipad has taken a local copy. After the download has taken place, those emails reside as local data for the Mail app. and there is no further link to them back to the server. How they arrived inside the Ipad app via which email protocol should be irrelevant. It is as Peter says, it is not a complete backup.
ITunes back up has taken a policy not to back up this local data in order no doubt to save space inside the back up archive on the assumption that the email data could be re-created.

The exact same problem occurs with iBooks and non purchased items like technical pdf files. That data is residing locally with the IBooks app inside the Ipad. ITunes Back up decided not to include those in the back up either, relying on the fact that most people will synch with ITunes and have bloated duplicates of everything elsewhere.

If you decide not to synch the Ipad with ITunes, which is optional, you loose the IBooks non purchased items upon restoring the back up.

Backups should have the option to be all inclusive so they can restore you to a known point in time completely. This technology has been available on PC’s and Mac’s via Timemachine for years already.

I can and do blame Apple for not at the very least making that policy an option for me to decide on.

Last Edited by eal at 26 Jul 20:33
eal
Lovin' it
VTCY VTCC VTBD

I would suggest you take a look at GoodReader as an alternative to iBooks if these issues bother you. You can have it sync to a folder on your network (or indeed anywhere on the internet via WebDAV). It’s a much more capable application than iBooks and does all manner of funky things.

I must admit, I thought an iTunes backup (as opposed to an iCloud backup) did copy data from all your application bundles (including iBooks), but I can’t say I’ve tried it recently.

Just as a point of reference, I’ve had an iPhone since launch and many subsequent devices and have never lost any data during a device changeover. I must be doing something weird…

Most of this is simply not true.

I have bought 20 iPads and about 10 iPhones for business purposes in the last 5 years – and it was never a problem to re-create the iPad from the backup, including all the data inside the apps. But of course you have to have an iTunes library with all the apps and iBooks. All my 100 aircraft manuals in Good Reader, for example, are on my new iPad.

With eMail you are right, POP3 eMail is not saved in the backup. But again: YOu can tell your Mail server NOT TO delete any eMails after you have downloaded them to your ipad. And then you can download them again and again.

If you decide not to synch the Ipad with ITunes, which is optional, you loose the IBooks non purchased items upon restoring the back up.

Exactly. But why decide against it if you want the iBooks??

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 27 Jul 08:45

YOu can tell your Mail server NOT TO delete any eMails after you have downloaded them to your ipad. And then you can download them again and again.

A small but important detail: if you have a POP email client configured to leave messages on the server, it cannot later re-download them. This is because each client maintains a record of message references which were downloaded, so next time it downloads only the new ones. To re-download, one would have to do a fresh install of the email client, or in some other way delete its message reference store.

IMAP must do something similar, though the message references may be stored on the server instead, with some sort of client ID as an index into the client device database.

The difference in peoples’ experiences in this discussion are probably due to the different ways which people of different backgrounds use the device. One often finds that someone who has a lot of IT / software development experience (as eal certainly has) ends up using consumer IT gear in ways which the manufacturer’s “usability committee” did not expect. Many (myself included) would call that arrogance… some would also call it “lack of documentation”. Try finding out exactly what Android backs up to google… good luck! You get articles from say 2013 which in this game is a century ago. Apple gets a lot of stick for its arrogance (ignoring what Steve Jobs used to call “edge cases”) but today’s Android is going the same way. One thing which Android retains is the much greater ease of rooting, which helps those of us who want to use the device differently Also Android doesn’t pretend that files don’t exist

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Apple’s “arrogance” is a myth. They are trying their best to develop the most user friendly devices – but of course they will NEVER satisfy software/computer gurus who want to keep absolute control over their devices. But a consumer orineted company like Apple will never develop devices or software tailored to the need of IT-specialists. That’s like expecting an F-16 from Cessna.

I also thought that it’s typical German to accuse anybody successful of “arrogance”. Everybody loved Apple when they were small and had 0.5 percent market share :-)

My experience, i must say, with Apple and its customer service is 100% positive:

- Every device that didn’t work was exchanged without one question in Munich’s Apple Store, among them a 2 year old iPhone the son of a friend had destroyed when he put it into a glass of Coke (drunk of course …)
- When I had my first iPhone five years ago and had a technical problem I sent an angry eMail to “[email protected]” … and got a call from Apple the next day and a new iPhone (now show me any other company of that size where the CEO could be reached liked that). And that’s not an isolated event, it happend many times.

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 27 Jul 08:47

Update:
I checked and found out that you actually CAN download POP3 eMails again, like onto a new device. You can downlaod them as often as you like, at least it’s possible with my provider (GMX), I think you need to delete a library on your iPad though (will check how that works)

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 27 Jul 13:20

As an update on this old thread, just in case anybody cares:

My Samsung 8.4" T700 tablet packed up so I bought a T705 on Ebay (has a 4G SIM slot; may be handy one day) and proceeded to do the – hey! – “google cloud” restore. It worked, except

  • all Firefox data lost (surprising)
  • K9 email config lost
  • most other app config lost
  • desktop config lost

So I rooted the T705 (2 hours wasted digging around android-anorak forums – used the Odin flasher / USB dev mode route; none of the one-click root apps worked) so I could restore the Titanium Backup backup off the SD card. That worked. Then I restored the Nova Desktop backup, which finished it off well. Not bad especially considering I was restoring a 4.4.2 backup to 5.0.2.

My guess is that the people who report that their google restore did restore everything are just using a small subset of stuff. Probably Chrome, and the built-in email (or not even that if using webmail e.g. gmail). And Contacts.

I also noticed that v5+ has some kind of “sync” feature, for replicating to another device.

As an aside, hopefully amusing, is this: if you let the T700 battery go totally flat, the device is for ever lost. No charger will charge it. Actually there is a way, found after a lot more life wasted googling: you connect it to a PC! Not kidding. The tablet detects that it is connected to a PC because it tries to enumerate it as a USB device, and it then starts a charge at about 0.4A. When it gets to a few % you can finish off with any normal charger. What a totally crap design…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Another update:

My S7 packed up so I am back to the S6. But I managed to get the data off the S7 before it went. The “phone switch” feature does basically what Apple’s does: it copies over the apps but not their private data/config, and the apps get reinstalled from the appstore (Apple offer an Itunes option which works for apps no longer in the shop). The best way to backup/restore the desktop config is to use a 3rd party desktop manager; I use the excellent Nova which can backup to dropbox etc etc.

The only way to backup/restore apps’ private data/config is with a rooted device and e.g. Titanium backup. So nothing has changed in the last year or two. I guess they can’t backup private data because that would open up the security, by apps storing config outside their sandbox.

This just proves even the most pricey consumer electronics (a £550 phone) can and does fail!

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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