[HOWTO] back up your data and settings - draft

[ewblen]

This post is prompted by the accidental complete erasure of my phone.

I’m going to write about what I’m currently doing, I’d like to hear about your experience and recommendations too.

This is about individual backup files for each app that potentially can be restored to a different model of phone etc. It is not about backups that save the entire memory of the phone e.g. nandroid or TWRP. And not about backing up applications, the assumption being that they can be reinstalled.

Other relevant topics

[HOWTO] Backup and Restore Data on Android Devices

This is an editable document a wiki and the document is Work in Progress. Users who have tried out other working methods of Backing and Restoring data can add / edit to this document. This includes the images - add screenshots where you have them and help make this document better. Backup and Restoring of Data One of the biggest issues new users have when switching to custom ROM’s is figuring out how to backup and later restore their current smartphone data. This backup could include contact,…

[HOWTO] End-to-end Encrypted Full Backup and Restore Solution for /e/OS using Termux and restic

In the wake of the upcoming /e/OS T release, I thought it would be handy to share a new Android backup solution I recently discovered and which is still fairly unknown, I guess About this backup solution We make use of restic here, a standalone command-line backup tool which generally works on all major platforms (Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows WSL, and Android) restic is free Open Source software and backups are end-to-end encrypted per default it allows you to store your encrypted backups …

Sync to murena.io (formerly ecloud.global)

With the default settings, the following things are sync’ed:

• Contacts

• Calendar

• Tasks

• Notes

• Photos

• Documents

• Music

• On murena.io Devices/DEVICE_ID/rom_settings/app_list/packages_list.csv - is there a way to use this when restoring a device

(TODO: find link to description of everything that syncs to murena.io, how to exclude things from sync)

I create a folder Documents/Backups/ to use as the destination location for various app backups. Everything in this folder syncs to murena.io .
In the following sections I call this Backups

Email

Using IMAP (the default these days), your emails remain on your mail server.

In the Mail or K9 Mail apps, go to Settings/Export settings where you can choose to export General settings as well as settings for each email account you are using. You need to do this manually each time you make (major) changes to the settings, or add a new email account.

SMS and phone logs

I use SMS backup and restore available via App Lounge. Despite the name, it also can back up phone call records.

It has a setting to do scheduled backups to a specified location, e.g. Backups.

Music

The Music folder is included in sync. If you have a large collection this will fill your storage on murena.io

To avoid this, I create another folder called music-nosync to contain my collection. The Music app will find files in here without any additional configuration.

Other apps

Aegis TOTP authenticator

Settings>Backups>Automatically back up the vault

AntennaPod podcasts

Enable Settings>Import/Export>Automatic database export, and choose your Backups folder. Database will be backed up every 3 days.

Catima loyalty card / barcode storage

Manual backup only using menu>Import/Export>Export

Firefox

Firefox sync can share bookmarks, payment methods, history, passwords and open tabs with another instance e.g. your desktop browser.

I use BitWarden for password storage, so my passwords are effectively backed up.

OpenTracks fitness/track recorder

Settings>Import and Export>Instant post-workout export
I give this its own sync’ed folder in Documents/OpenTracks

OSMAnd maps

Manually Settings>Export to file

Signal chat

Period backup can be enabled in Settings>Chat>Chat backups

Seedvault?

I don’t know much about this built in backup thingy. Particularly how to check what is being backed up, and how to test that the backup is working correctly.

[smu44]

Nice post @ewblen

Since a while, I’ve planned to try a backup/restore of apps using App Manager in ADB over TCP mode.
Never found time and/or motivation

[petefoth]

@ewblen

I use SMS backup and restore available via App Lounge. Despite the name, it also can back up phone call records.

I prefer SMS Import / Export because it is FOSS

@ewblen

Seedvault?

I don’t know much about this built in backup thingy. Particularly how to check what is being backed up, and how to test that the backup is working correctly.

I have not had good experiences with SeedVault: too many apps are either not backed up at all, or cannot be restored successfully.

For more on this subject, check out the solutions in this wiki post. They won’t backup ‘EVERYTHING’ , but they are the best I’ve found.