Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 227 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#91
post #6

The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things. Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.

> The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. Are you using Google Authenticator? If so, how do you backup your secrets?

aegis plus syngcthing fork works well

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#92
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My device is rooted A problem in and of itself: brittle when upgrading, won't work with you banking app, etc...

Just install a couple Magisk modules and your banking app should work fine. At least mine does.

Sorry for a dumb question, what are those

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#93
post #6

The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things. Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.

> The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. Are you using Google Authenticator? If so, how do you backup your secrets?

It has an export function that you can scan from an old phone. And I kept the setup keys in my keepass database.

On top of that now Google backs those up for you too.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#95
post #30

I don't have root on my android and I try to avoid using any FAANG's infrastructure. A few weeks ago I bricked my phone and lost a bunch of data because I only backed up my photos. More on that in a sec, but the big thing I learned is how much stuff on my phone I didn't miss once it was gone and how much I did miss. App backup? who cares? This was a chance for me to see what's new on F-Droid and it's been great (look…

try flickboard. once it stops melting your brain it is awesome

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#97
I just spent the last few weeks figuring out how to solve this problem for myself after running out of space on my free Google plan, so here goes.. I do have a NAS at home, so I was basically trying to move my backup from Google Cloud to my local NAS. Another consideration was that my wife should be able to use the solution so it needed to be simple and hands-off.

Probably the most difficult to solve for is Google Photos. Google offers 15 GB, and this gets filled up really fast if you take a lot of photos and videos. I don't, but still with every phone upgrade I've tried to move all files over to my new device, which results in space running out quite quickly. On top of that, Photos is actually _really_ nice. It works seamlessly, and offers features like facial recognition out of the box.

Anyway, I tried 3 different options - Nextcloud, Syncthing, and Immich.

Nextcloud was a little too complicated to setup, even with docker. Wasn't impressed by it.

Syncthing had an issue with Android app support. I think there are a couple of forks, but I didn't want to rely on that.

Immich was what I finally settled on. It is photos/videos specific, so doesn't work as a general purpose backup but I was more than happy just solving for this. My Google storage was being used roughly half and half by Email and Photos. Solving for half was good enough! On the plus side, Immich is a really impressive Google Photos replacement, and behaves almost exactly the same as the Google app, and has advanced features like facial recognition, dupe detection etc.

For email, contacts, SMS etc, I'm still relying on native Google backup.

Finally, there was Whatsapp. I had disabled Google backup a while ago, but wanted to preserve the photos from it. For that, I configured Immich to sync the whatsapp images folder with my library, and that's been working perfectly well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#98
post #6

The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things. Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.

Titanium backup requires root to do anything useful at this point, since apps can set a flag to allow backup of their data or not.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#99
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just install a couple Magisk modules and your banking app should work fine. At least mine does.

Sorry for a dumb question, what are those

Magisk is a way to handle root on Android, it allows to insert system modules to change some things deep in Android. There used to be a feature called Magisk Hide that could make apps unable to detect you were rooted. Now you have to install other modules to circumvent safety net and other checks. It's an arms race : google changes the way it detects things, and modules developers update their circumvention techniques. Try to search "magisk hide 2024" and you should find more information

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

#100
rclone [1] (bidirectional sync) on Termux [2], with Termux:Widget [3] to make syncing as simple as a button press. I backup my stuff to Google Drive, although rclone has many other supported remotes.

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/

[3] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux.widget/

Post reply on HN