A few months after advising it would be included in a future version of Android, Google has finally begun rolling out a manual backup option.
The manual backup is rolling out to a range of phones, including Google devices as well as other phones including the Droid Turbo (running Marshmallow) according to 9to5Google. The feature can be found in the Settings app on compatible phones, under a Backup menu (hint: search ‘backup’ in Settings and you’ll find it). Depending on your phone, you can find the feature under Settings > Google > Backup as well.
Rather than waiting for the phone to be charging and connected to Wi-Fi, the manual backup option allows you to initiate the backup whenever you want, skirting the issue of dodgy USB connections or lack of WiFi connectivity. If you are on a cellular connection you will be warned about perhaps incurring data charges before the backup is initiated.
Once initiated you’ll see a notification advising how the backup is going, but it takes a fair while and will eat up a bit of your data cap so be warned.
After your backup completes you’ll see updated dates/times for when Android last backed up your App data, Call History, Contacts, Device Settings, Photos & Videos and SMS messages.
Having an option to trigger a manual backup of your device in its current state will of course make it much easier to switch phones with the latest backup containing all your important data. It’s not a common thing for most users, but we here at Ausdroid certainly appreciate it.
How often do you switch phones? Will this help you out?
The only thing I worry about now when moving phones is my SMS history; which a number of apps can cover, but I guess if it’s available in another Google service this might be good for me? *shrug*
Hmm the option is there in Drive on my Z Play but it doesn’t seem to give options to back up just the SMS history, so I’m not going to bother with it for when the 6T arrives this week
Alas no love for the OPPO R15 Pro. Seriously beginning to question my decision to purchase the R15 Pro over the Nokia 7.1 Plus.
Problem is though, this backup doesn’t last very long.. I’ve done a full backup before sending my phone for repair. When it came back 2 weeks later and I turned it on for the first time, it says no backups found on Google cloud!!
I just checked and I’ve got this option on my Nokia 7 Plus. Cool.
I change Android phones regularly – many each year – and have never had to worry about losing ANY data, except for SMSs – for which I use a free app and which is only a tiny upload.
Other than that photos are on Google Photos, contacts on Google Contacts, docs, PDFs and sheets on Google Drive, appointments on Google Calendar, even WhatsApp just restores itself when first launched on a new Android smartphone.
So backup is a totally unnecessary “feature” that only uses up extra unnecessary Internet traffic.