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Does Android have a "total backup" option?

Backup to google drive and restore from it, maybe? How exactly to do that varies between OS versions.

Is the Phone Switch feature available on the Xiomi? That works quite well for the banal everyday stuff e.g. Contacts, Messages, etc and it transfers apps but IME AFAIK the actual apps are re-downloaded from the appstore, on the destination phone.

May also be able to transfer Contacts over bluetooth.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

As this is the Android backup question thread:

I need to transfer contacts from a Samsung Android 2.3 phone to a new Xiomi Redmi S3. So both Android but not Samsung, therefore no Kies Transfer.

Any ideas are very welcome indeed.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Yes, IOS is based on freeBSD or some such, no? I did root one IOS device years ago but it doesn’t get you anything because the directories have mostly obfuscated numeric names – just like Symbian used to. Whereas a rooted Android device is relatively obvious.

You might ask why bother rooting. One example might be a camera app which stores jpegs and raws in different places, and isn’t configurable, but actually you want both of these in one place on an external SD card (another thing IOS devices don’t have).

I think it was Jobs who made the phrase popular.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

iOS has a filing system too, but there’s a jobsworth filing clerk sat between you and it :)

ps. you perfectly described a bunch of edge cases above!

pps. I didn’t attribute the ‘edge case’ phrase to Steve Jobs – did he really use it in anger?

There was uproar and Apple added a new tag for data which didn’t need backing up, but also shouldn’t be deleted. This is of course the right tag for map data.

Unless the data is no longer available, or you have stopped paying some outrageous rate for updates but are happy to use old data, and your phone has packed up and has to be replaced, and then what? Are you going to open up both of them and transfer the flash chip(s) over? That probably won’t work anyway.

This is one problem with today’s IT industry culture

  • everything is in the “cloud”
  • the “cloud” is free and so is wifi/3g data access, everywhere in the world
  • everything has to be current (yesterday is dead and gone)
  • an app not in the app shop is sh*itty, crap, trash, etc (a post in one phone forum just now)
  • if an app is not supported with data, it’s worthless (so only an idiot would use a satnav app with last year’s data, even though some 99% of the mileage is just the same)

If you don’t go by the above, you are an “edge case” (C) Steve Jobs

Incidentally, I blew away my home adsl allowance of 50GB/month by multiple failed installs of Tomtom, at 7GB a time

So actually a total backup of absolutely the whole phone (what most normal people would call a “backup”) is desirable.

One big tip for minimising hassle with backup and restore on iOS. If you do do it via iTunes, it’s very important that you choose to encrypt the backup and set a password. If you don’t, quite sensibly none of your passwords will be included which is a pain in the behind come restore time.

Actually, I find that attitude (not yours) highly patronising.

My PC is full of confidential data. And it is not encrypted – because encrypting drives is a recipe for losing everything if something goes. It is up to me to decide what security risk I am happy with.

But, yes, there’s another data point for loss of data with IOS!

I have obviously been as lucky as you have been unlucky!

I think that high-end consumer IT (Apple, Samsung, Sony, old Nokia, etc) is all very similar on hardware reliability. It is all made in the same place (Foxconn, or down the road from there) and with small sample sizes you can get big variations.

Android … is a little less robust at times.

For sure, but it has a filing system

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I am no apple fan but its stuff does work very well and backups etcare very robust. I much prefer Android but it actually is a little less robust at times.

EGTK Oxford

With regard to failure rates, in my insanely Apple-y household we have 4 x iPhone, 3 x iPad, 2 x Mac, 2 x MacBook, 3 x Apple TV and 1 x Airport Express. Never once had a faulty bit of kit except for self inflicted mechanical damage.

I have obviously been as lucky as you have been unlucky!

Peter wrote:

As you know, Skydemon, (with which you are/were closely associated) was losing mapdata because it was storing it in some storage space which for years IOS developers assumed was “theirs” but which a later version of IOS reclaimed. So there was a flurry of IOS updates and app updates… SD was not the only affected app by far. Many apps which store gigabytes of data got caught. Foreflight was one IIRC, as were various satnav apps.

That was in 2012 – four years is a long time in IT! But yes, it caught a few people unawares. SkyDemon actually did the right thing by tagging the ‘re-downloadable’ content as such. The problem was that the OS would then go ahead and delete it if the device was running low on space. Which is just what you didn’t want five seconds before you were going to set off flying. There was uproar and Apple added a new tag for data which didn’t need backing up, but also shouldn’t be deleted. This is of course the right tag for map data.

I do therefore wish you contributed your expertise to EuroGA much more often

I do contribute whenever I think I’ve got anything useful to say – I don’t just twitter on for the sake of it though :)

The 2nd Ipad actually developed another fault: the HDMI output stopped working, but the kid at the “genius bar” told me it’s not a “core function” and told me to basically f-off.

That’s indefensible – I hope you didn’t just take that lying down. Of course it’s a core function.

Clearly developers have had a choice of different places for data storage and didn’t always get them right.

Actually, on iOS you have zero choice. Your app can only write to inside it’s own container – end of story. There’s no access to any other part of the filesystem. Every app is completely sandboxed. What you do have for each file are ‘attributes’ which hint to the operating system what kind of file it is. If the app developer doesn’t set the attributes correctly then stuff won’t behave has it should. It’s a good system but does rely on the developers actually reading the documentation.

One big tip for minimising hassle with backup and restore on iOS. If you do do it via iTunes, it’s very important that you choose to encrypt the backup and set a password. If you don’t, quite sensibly none of your passwords will be included which is a pain in the behind come restore time.

I’ve had Apple devices since the first iPhone and have never lost a single solitary byte of data over probably a dozen device changes. I just don’t give it a second thought and expect it to just work.
This will sound like a fanboy response but it’s entirely reasonable to want to set the record straight!

Well, Steve, you always know you can get me into a corner because you are an IOS expert but I am not. I do therefore wish you contributed your expertise to EuroGA much more often

As you know, Skydemon, (with which you are/were closely associated) was losing mapdata because it was storing it in some storage space which for years IOS developers assumed was “theirs” but which a later version of IOS reclaimed. So there was a flurry of IOS updates and app updates… SD was not the only affected app by far. Many apps which store gigabytes of data got caught. Foreflight was one IIRC, as were various satnav apps.

I am not familiar with the terminology so haven’t managed to google the actual software versions which were affected. Something like IOS 8.01 comes to mind but of course you will know what I mean.

Similarly, other IOS apps lost data because the developer stored it in “the wrong place”. Not Apple’s fault of course but the result to the user is the same. Justine had an Iphone4 and after it went back to the shop for a replacement (incoming calls would not ring) a lot of config data was missing after the restore. Stuff like server config on a 3rd party email app. I lost some config on an Ipad2 which went back for a replacement (yes, a 100% failure rate with Apple products in our household). The 2nd Ipad actually developed another fault: the HDMI output stopped working, but the kid at the “genius bar” told me it’s not a “core function” and told me to basically f-off.

Clearly developers have had a choice of different places for data storage and didn’t always get them right.

So, there you go, a data point to the contrary.

have been doing weird edge-case stuff then…

I thought “edge cases” came and went with Steve Jobs I would never dream of calling a customer “edge case” but he made enough money to not worry about that.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Not my experience with ipad and iphone.

You’ve either been extremely unlucky, or have been doing weird edge-case stuff then…

I’d go out on a limb and say that it ‘Just Works’ 99.99%+ of the time. With many hundreds of millions of devices out there, the vast majority of which are in ‘non-technical’ users hands, it’s fairly obvious that they want this stuff to work as seamlessly as possible.

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