natehoy
Well-known member
I think you can back up a lot of that stuff, but not restore it without root, but I may be wrong.
For Google's apps, chances are most of the data is actually up on their servers to start with and any data you have on the phone is a cached copy. So if you're saving stuff in Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts (People), etc, you're good.
But each phone manufacturer adds their own special sauce, like HTC adds an overlay to "people" and adds the concept of a phone book that is resident only on the phone and must be backed up using HTC's or Verizon's (in my case) special toolkit. So I only create contacts on my actual phone long enough to get to a computer where I can re-enter the data directly into my Google contact database where it's safely backed up. Then Sense bugs me about "linking" the two contacts.
It's the same problem with game data - really there should be a stock way to "save" the entire home directory and "restore" it, and that should be able to be done over the wire to a Google server somewhere. Of course, that would depend on app developers all putting their data in the home directory like is (generally) done in Linux.
Samsung probably does similar things with their S-stuff. My wife has a Galaxy S2 but she also uses Google's webpage for contact management and has not used any Samsung-specific programs that I know of.
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