How to fully back up your Android device
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Hopefully your Android phone or tablet won’t ever be lost, stolen, smashed up in an accident, or swept out to sea—but if the worst should happen, you’ll be glad that you took the time to make a backup of everything on the device.
Our digital companion gadgets hold a lot of important data, from photos to messages, and losing all of that data is something you want to avoid. With some apps, such as Gmail, everything is automatically backed up to the cloud anyway. For other apps and files, you need to take some proactive steps before disaster strikes.
The good news is that you can now back up an Android device without too much hassle and without taking up a huge chunk of your day. These instructions are written for Pixel and Galaxy phones, but the process for other Android handsets and tablets is similar.
Photos and videos
Photos and videos are a good place to start, and Google Photos is the obvious option here: Launch the app, then tap your profile picture (top right), and Photos settings > Backup. Make sure the Backup toggle switch is turned on, and that every location on your phone where photos and videos are stored is included in the Back up device folders list.
Tap Backup quality to choose whether or not Google Photos stores full resolution copies of your photos and videos in the cloud. The benefit of choosing slightly compressed copies is that you won’t have to pay as much for cloud storage: You get 15GB of free space across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos, and beyond that Google One plans start at $2 per month for 100GB of room.
If you have a lot of photos and videos to back up, you may find the convenience of having everything in Google Photos worth the monthly fee. You can then get at your files from any device, and you can even add in photos and videos from iPhones, iPads, Windows computers, and Macs too. If you’d rather not pay for cloud storage though, you do still have options.
For Windows, the easiest approach is to use the Phone Link tool that comes with the operating system. Fire it up from the Start menu, follow the instructions for connecting your Android device, and you can then transfer files between the two devices in a variety of ways: Select some images in Google Photos on your phone, for instance, tap Share, and your Windows PC should appear as an option.
If you’re using a Mac, there’s no built-in option for sharing—the most straightforward third-party option we’ve come across is MacDroid, though it can be a little temperamental. The app is free to use, as long as you’re only transferring from Android to macOS, and you can pay $20 a year for the Pro version if you need to transfer files in the other direction too.
Besides Google Photos, there are plenty of other cloud syncing options out there that will back up the photos and videos on your Android device to the cloud, and to computers. One of the best tools for the job is Dropbox—though as with Google Photos, you don’t get much in the way of free storage (prices start at $10 a month for 2TB of storage).
Messages and Android settings
If you use Google Messages for your texts, you can back up these conversations to Google Drive: Go to Settings on your Android phone, then choose System > Backup on a Pixel phone, or Accounts and backup > Back up data (under Google Drive) on a Galaxy phone. Galaxy phones also offer a Samsung Cloud option on the same screen.
This backup doesn’t just cover your messages, as it also includes details of the apps you’ve got installed, your call history, and the settings on your device (the way you’ve got Android set up). As with Google Photos, this counts towards your Google cloud storage quota, so you may need to pay for extra at some stage.
For other messaging apps, you need to investigate the backup options provided with the app itself. For some apps, such as Facebook Messenger, everything is saved in the cloud anyway—you can simply log into these accounts on a new phone and all of your conversation history will be quickly synced across.
For other apps, find the relevant backup option: With WhatsApp, for example, tap the three dots (top right) on the Chats tab, then select Settings > Chats > Chat backup. You can configure what gets backed up and when, and again Google Drive is the cloud storage solution used to store a copy of your conversations.
Other files and data
In terms of files stored on your phone and nowhere else, photos, videos, and messages cover most of it. However, there might be other files dotted around your device that you don’t want to lose if you no longer have access to your phone: You can open up the Files app in Android to see files you’ve downloaded and saved, for example.
One way of backing up these files is simply to select them in the Files app, tap the three dots (top right), then choose Back up to Google Drive. You could also use the Windows and macOS file transfer methods mentioned above for moving files over, as well. However, there’s no automatic backup option built into the Files app.
To make sure your backups are as comprehensive as possible, you should go through your Android apps one by one, and check where they’re storing their data. A lot of the time, everything is going to be synced to the cloud automatically—this is going to be the case with your Spotify playlists and Netflix movies, for example.
Be sure to check your mobile browser of choice too, to make sure everything is syncing from the app to the cloud and to the other devices where you’ve got the browser installed (think passwords, browsing history, and bookmarks). In the case of Google Chrome, you can find these settings by tapping the three dots (top right), then tapping on Settings and your Google account at the top.
The post How to fully back up your Android device appeared first on Popular Science.
