Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Does Android have a "total backup" option?

Surprisingly I cannot find an answer to this online…

IOS has a total backup of the phone so if you lose the phone you buy another one and restore it, and you have the “same” phone.

How is this achieved with Android?

There are many half-solutions e.g. Titanium Backup which, on a rooted phone, will backup apps and their data. But not O/S stuff. So one gets replies like this

The backup could be big because it could include photos, movies, etc. With a 32GB phone it could be 32GB plus whatever other storage there is which won’t come preconfigured the same way on the replacement phone. You don’t really want to be uploading this to dropbox or anywhere because it would take days or weeks (unless you are on fibre ADSL).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The answer appears to be NO.

The nearest you can get is an app called MyBackup and, for saving app-specific data, a rooted phone is needed.

A very similar prog called TitaniumBackup is also good but has fewer options for saving general user data and the more OS-related stuff like pics, movies, wallpapers, etc.

“Cloud” backup is more limited.

No wonder Apple got so far ahead when they got ahead. The average Joe Public would just lose almost everything if they lost their Android phone.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

The average Joe Public would just lose almost everything if they lost their Android phone.

I have migrated 5 times since I started using Android and never lost any data. Normally there is no local data on the phones, everything is cloud based. I’ve never had to extract data from a phone when moving to another.

How exactly do you do it?

I am talking about automatically restoring

  • apps
  • their config
  • icons, layouts, preferences
  • sms
  • emails
  • pics, videos
  • all phone config e.g. 3G-only or 3G+4G etc

BTW desktop saves are doable with Nova Desktop.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I had my first iPhone in 2010 and i always switch to the latest model. “Restore iphone from backup”… one mouse click. Then i reset the old one and sell it on ebay …

There must be something similar from Samsung or Google, i am sure

Apparently there isn’t.

My guess is that there is sufficient variation (in hardware features etc) within the Android world that an Apple-type backup / restore would cause a high level of, ahem, reduced positive user experience

Plus, looking at this from a cynical marketing POV, frankly, IMHO, most people don’t really care if they lose a lot of stuff. Most “modern” people treat all comms as instant messaging so any email beyond 5 lines is 5 lines long, and yesterday’s emails are irrelevant unless they hold earth shattering information. Plus any Android user is supposed to use Gmail which is webmail and thus unaffected. Pics are yesterday’s pics after they have been put on facebook, etc.

It does surprise me though. Even Nokia backup would restore pretty well onto the same model phone. Well, with the “obvious” caveats like paid apps would be lost and have to be re-downloaded from the shop, IMEI-locked apps were lost anyway (esp. if the vendor had vanished)…

I guess that I am looking for something which a lot of people aren’t bothered about

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

I guess that I am looking for something which a lot of people aren’t bothered about

Yes. I honestly do not know what I am missing out when switching my mobile. The user interface config is done in a few minutes, it’s a new device anyway. Email, pictures, etc. are all on the cloud and for apps, there’s a way to restore them.

It’s quite nice to not drag along all legacy but start from scratch. In the same way I use 5 desktop computers and laptops at different places. I never miss anything that is on one computer but not another because there isn’t really anything on them — it’s all in the cloud.

A different paradigm but it works very well.

When I change android phones it works well. I don’t store anything meaningful on the phone. Settings etc are backed up fine, log into Google account and it all comes back.

EGTK Oxford

Achim – you confirm what I am saying

for apps, there’s a way to restore them.

You re-download them all from the app shop?

BTW how do you back up (what can be backed up) to google drive?

The devil is always in the detail.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

You re-download them all from the app shop?

Yes, sure. That’s very easy.

Peter wrote:

BTW how do you back up (what can be backed up) to google drive?

What should I backup? Never missed anything. A few apps keep data like my password vault but they have their own cloud storage / sync. The idea is that you do not use anything that does not mirror its data on the cloud. That’s really what makes life so much easier. If I start creating local data, then I’m back in the Windows 3.1 days with backups etc.

I don’t backup my desktops and laptops either. Nothing on them that isn’t found on the other systems and the cloud.

To go back to aviation: I organize it like Lufthansa. Crews and airplanes get assigned by random so that neither a captain/first officer nor pilot/airplane combo gets too cozy and SOP deviations happen. That’s how you treat your computer and mobile devices these days

63 Posts
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top