I am doing my best to try and work out how to back up some of my phone to an SD card before upgrading. Unfortunately, I am not making much sense of it. Is the issue due to upgrading being delayed?
Those things I have been able to back up to my PC I have done (my photos, and the telephone calls I have made via Relay UK). But backing up to the SD card is random at best. It seems only very little of what I have in my ‘Files’ on my phone will back up. These are usually PDF’s. Many files won’t open; some are archived and won’t open and I don’t know how they ended up archived as I don’t remember instructing anything to be archived.
When I attempt to back up contacts, (‘Settings’ then ‘Export’ then ‘Export to .vcf file’), it seems to do something, but it’s quick and the kB are low. When I attempt to open up to see if the Contacts have been saved, I am prompted to ‘Open with Contacts’ Just once or Always, or to open with a different app (Notes is the only other choice given). When I click on ‘Just once’, it then asks me to confirm whether I want to ‘Import contacts from vCard?’ The arrow moves upwards at the top of the screen for maybe two seconds, and that’s it. It doesn’t open. I have noticed on looking at one of my contacts that his number appears repeatedly in a long list, so I am thinking that’s due to the erroneous way I am doing things.
My attempt at saving text/SMS conversations: ‘Backup and restore’, then ‘Backup location’ then create a folder in the disk and backup. But again, when I try and open it to see if it has succeeded, it won’t open. I have also just tried doing it via ‘Restore’, and it is showing me ‘Backup details’ followed by today’s date and time and the number of messages (1757, which seems right), and asking me to either tap of ‘Cancel’ or ‘Restore’, but I am not sure what it means by restore, so I haven’t tapped on that yet.
So yes, I am very stuck, and I would like to learn how to do this so I can upgrade my phone regularly from now on. Thank you very much.
I ended up using a combo of PC and plain old paper to back up what I could, and then went ahead and upgraded via ‘Settings’ (and I updated after that). It worked without a hitch. I am actually disappointed to report that nothing was erased at all. After all that time spent backing up everything! Now I will be spending time deleting all the things I no longer need. Oh well.
I still don’t find the phone too user-friendly. I don’t know why or how some things get archived or how to access those things once they are archived. I have documents and downloads that, when I tap on them to open, I am asked what I want to open with, and I have no clue, but when I try the options they don’t manage to open anything. I will have to explore each thing and see if I can get everything to work properly. Thank you again.
good feedback as to what are user difficulties. Inspecting the export output of Contacts, Calendars or Notes without an intent to import isn’t recognized as use case. You can inspect .vcf, .ical or .json in a plaintext Editor or in these closed source apps:
starlte as device can’t go beyond A13 atm. Seedvault, the built-in backup (Settings → System → Backup) only gets better - in terms of what it can include in the backup - with A14 and up.
Please feel free to ask a specific question but I suggest only one item at a time until you fully understand the answer. Android seems quite difficult in this respect until you understand the file extension and its purpose.
