I now very little about backing up an Android phone. I have a Nexus 5 with Android Ver 6.0.1.

I would like to make a full backup of everything. I've just spent the last hour trying to purchase a program that will allow me to back it up to my PC.

It sounds like a real pain in the ass... all sorts of stuff about root access and the how the OS needs to be hacked first. Then I can download software from an unknown company without a phone number or any way to purchase support and trust they will copy everything off my hacked phone to my pc without anything going wrong.

This sounds so strange! There must be an easy to use application.

Any suggestions?

Harvey,

I have an Android (Samsung S4 Mini) and I rooted it and installed Titanium Backup. Titanium Backup backed up to my Gmail or wherever. There's a great YouTube video on Titanium Backup by some young guy who is very enthusiastic about it.

However, a couple of weeks ago one of these Samsung/Verizon/Google (I forgot which one) was pushing down updates. The updates failed and I had to run an updater while connected to my PC. Long story short, the update unrooted my Android and now Titanium Backup does not work. I've decided not to go through the pain or rooting again.

Thanks for your reply. It is not clear what going through the process of Rooting buy me? I want to be able to backup all my apps as installed with user accounts and passwords in place. This backup should include all my photos, contacts and anything else I added to the phone. And any configuration stuff made to the OS or native apps.

Why is this so hard to do on both iPhones (iTunes sucks because to get to the data I have to sync it would my contacts in Outlook) and Andriods...

The rooting of the phone allows you to install something as powerful as Titanium Backup. Goto YouTube and look for videos on Titanium Backup. I think it will do what you want.

Why is this so hard to do on both iPhones (iTunes sucks because to get to the data I have to sync it would my contacts in Outlook) and Andriods...

Because they want to lock you into their eco system. Most people use the cloud solutions for backup which cost money if you go over a certain size, and that's exactly the point 😃

I use those but I keep my phone clean - there's not enough data on it to ever get charged.

On iPhone you can specify what to sync exactly to iTunes (ie. turn off outlook and calendar syncing etc.), but I agree the process sucks.

The more pertinent question though is this:

Why sync at all? I don't treat my phone as a storage device. I pull of the data I want off of it or put it somewhere like Dropbox.

My contacts come from Google Contacts (ie. they sync already to my Google account), music is synced FROM my computer (I never buy music through my phone) and photos you can always access directly via DCIM folders. That doesn't leave anything that I care about on the phone.

I have two phones - an iPhone and an Android device and both have the same stuff on it (except for pictures) and I couldn't care less if the data on either phone is trashed.

+++ Rick ---

Thisi s an interesting way to look at the problem. I have never looked at Google for contacts. Most of mine come from text messaging. So I will have to look at how my google account might intereact with my phone. But this still raises the question do I want Google indexing everything I do... no not really which is why after all these years I still have a private mail server. In writing this, I'm wondering if Icewarp client also supports contacts... which it must so perhaps this is a consideration.

Yeah but on an iphone your contacts come in and go into your contact manager which you can sync to Google Contacts. Anything that comes in through mail, SMS and even facebooks can go into Contacts and sync to Google Contacts. It just works.

Apple of course wants you to use their contact management, but that's not nearly as flexible and only works with their devices and if you're on a PC you're out of luck or doing it through special hell that is iTunes 😃

But the nice thing is since I use both Android and iOS everything is always synced - email and contacts.

SMS that's a whole other issue, but then again I don't care about SMS for anything but the immediate messages that come - I couldn't care about history. SMS is never synced because it's always tied to the phone.

+++ Rick ---