TWRP and TitaniumBackup (phone needs to be rooted). SMBSync2 (open-source android app, one of the few/only(?) that supports samba 2/3) to samba share (TrueNAS).
Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#22Is it really necessary to have a proprietary backup solution on Android OS? Don’t get me wrong, this shall not be a buy-iPhone-be-happy-posting. But it really shocks me (well it’s also kind of amusing) to hear, that you are really talking about rooting your devices, to have a backup solution. So, back to topic: I’m really curious, doesn’t Android really ship with a working backup/restore-solution out of the box?
Nope. Especially when switching from a phone with a SD card to one without.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#23I backup files (images and videos, mostly) to Nextcloud using the Nextcloud app, and sync my contacts and calendars to Nextcloud as well using DAVdroid. For 2FA tokens, it depends on whether I root the phone or not (Aegis authenticator app with backups for when I don't root it). Basically, the only thing I lose is usually SMS messages since all the other messengers seem to keep message history server side (like Teleg…
Nextcloud can watch directories and automatically upload new files created in these.
I use this to sync every photo and video I take immediately, as well as to back up the backups generated daily by Signal.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#24Resilio Sync or SyncThing works wonders. For photos I use Google Photos though I've been meaning to move that off somewhere else.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#25You'd think Google drive would allow to easily back up the entire hard drive of an Android phone, but it can't. Photo can back up photos and that's it. Normally contacts and messages can be synced if they are saved as gmail contacts, and messages as whatever google messaging app "du jour". But frankly the backup situation on Android sucks compared to the iPhone.
No full backup solution AFAIK without rooting the phone or using a paid solution that needs an app on the phone itself.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#26Still waiting for a good backup solution for iPhones which isn’t iCloud
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#27I use a python script that shells out to adb for what I want. Photos for example starts with a an "adb shell find /sdcard/DCIM/Camera -name .jpg -o -name .mp4" to collect a list, then iterates over that list with "adb pull -a ". It's primitive but works.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#28Still waiting for a good backup solution for iPhones which isn’t iCloud
You can complete full backups of your iOS device in MacOS (not sure about other operating systems)
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#29Still waiting for a good backup solution for iPhones which isn’t iCloud
Backup to a Macbook/iMac. It's what I do when I get a new iPhone — much faster to restore than over iCloud or wireless transfer. Only issue is that, of course, it isn't automatic.
Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your Android phone?
#30For those who haven't encountered it yet, titanium backup (per-app) and TWRP (full partitions) are the gold standard... Assuming you control your phone. I'm not aware of any solution if you don't have root or an unlocked bootloader; AFAIK Google's official solution is sync to Drive (or ... Google One, now? If that's different?), but last I checked support was spotty, and of course that requires internet.
Titanium Backup alongside versioned backups to my computer via Syncthing has worked well for me.