You drop your phone. It's in a really good case, so nothing breaks. But it fell off the curb and a bus came along. Crunch!
Now you ask "how can I get my data back?" About the same way you get your written notes back after you burned the papers and scattered the ashes to the wind. You don't.
So how do you make sure you don't lose your data if your phone gets damaged, stolen, wiped or something else catastrophic? (BTW, this doesn't apply only to phones. It's the same for any Android device.)
If you can install a custom recovery, like TWRP, you can back up the data partition any time you think the last data has changed enough since the last backup that the backup is outdated. Always copy the backup to another device, like your PC or laptop and, for insurance, to a cloud account. Then, if you have to replace the phone, you can just install TWRP on the new phone and restore the data in one shot. (CWM is another custom recovery, and it works about the same way, but one can't read the other's backups, they use different formats, so stick to one.)
If you don't want to do that (or you have a locked bootloader so you can't install a custom recovery, and there's no Safestrap for your phone [it inserts itself into the boot process and allows you to run a modified version of TWRP], or you don't want to install Safestrap), you have to back up each kind of data individually.
Contacts:
All your contacts should be entered as Google contacts. The default, unfortunately is Phone or Device. so the contacts don't get backed up to anywhere, so if the phone gets lost or damaged, so do your contacts. You have to change that for each contact you enter, as you enter it. Google doesn't allow that to be edited later. (Note: later versions of Android DO allow it to be edited.) Fortunately, there are at least two easy ways to fix that:
1) If you have a SIM in your phone (Edit: - you can use the phone's internal storage to do that), export (it's in the menu in the Contacts app) the contacts to the SIM card (or internal storage). Then import them (same menu), and you'll be able to choose your Google account. They're now Google contacts. You'll probably have duplicates. Delete the ones that aren't Google contacts - after checking thet the imported contacts imported all the data. If it didn't, manually add the missing data to the Google contact, then delete the Device contact.
2) If you don't have a SIM, install the MyPhoneExplorer app. Connect the phone to your computer (where you'll have installed the PC end of the app already) and connect to the phone. MyPhoneExplorer can use USB, WiFi or Bluetooth to connect, it's your choice. Sync your contacts from the phone to the PC. Now comes the tedious part. For each contact, copy it (the usual stuff - right-click/copy), then paste it. Open the one you just pasted and you'll find that Phone or Device is a dropdown and you can change it to Google. Save it and delete the original. Do that for every contact. On the phone, delete all your contacts. Now sync MyPhoneExplorer to the phone. When you edit a contact in the phone's Contact app, you'll see that it's a Google contact.
Now, whichever way you did it, go to Settings, to Accounts, to your Google (not GMail, they're different) account, and sync contacts if they don't show that they were just synced. (If syncing for contacts is disabled, enable it to sync. If it's enabled, it should have synced by the time you get there, or still be syncing.)
Now if you go to Google Contacts, you'll see all your contacts on the page. Any time you set up another phone with that Google account and have Contact syncing enabled, it'll sync between the phone and that page.
Phone Log:
If you want to back up your call logs, there's a free app for that - Call Logs Backup & Restore.
Calendar:
If you have calendar sync enabled, this will sync to the Google Calendar, and resync if the phone is replaced or wiped, so there's no need to save it separately.
EMail:
Email is saved on the email server if you have your email account (on your email provider's site) set as an IMAP account. (A POP3 account saves emails on the device, so you have to back up each one you want to keep individually.). You don't have to sync it. If you want to save the text of an email in a text file on the phone for some reason, copy the file to the PC, in the folder you keep the files you back up from the phone.
Texts:
You can use SMS Backup & Restore to back up all your messages.
Apps:
Anything you installed from the Play Store or Amazon Appstore is remembered, so you can install it again. Even if you paid for it, the fact that you paid for it for that phone is remembered. (In the Play Store, the "Install" button will say "Installed", but that just means that you already installed that app. Press it and it will install the app again.) But installing 100 apps takes a lot of download time, so back your apps up. I use App Backup & Restore. It creates .apk files as backups. Those are the files that install the apps, so if you want to uninstall an app because you're not using it much, or you need to free up some space, then later on you want to reinstall it, you just find the .apk file, tap it and the app will install. If you're restoring all of them, install App Backup & Restore first, then you can install all the archived apps in 2 taps (well, 3, really - you don't want to install App Backup & Restore, so you tap to enable them all, tap to disable App Backup & Restore, then tap Install.) (Make sure you copy the App_Backup_Restore folder to your PC.
Apk Extractor is another good app backup app. It doesn't give you the restore menu, but it's small and fast.
Apps save data. A game may save your current status, an app to keep a record of car maintenance may keep a record of what's been done when, etc. and you'll want to save that data. Helium will do that. It needs a rooted phone to work, but if the phone isn't rooted, it'll tell you to download a file to your PC. That gets around the fact that the phone's not rooted. You can back up apps as well as data in Helium, but it backs apps up in its own format, so if you want to reinstall just one app, you have to have Helium installed too - and if the phone's not rooted, and you just installed Helium to install that one app, you'll have to connect the phone to the PC so Helium can get its permission again. Helium's folder is named carbon. Save that to your PC (and your cloud account) too.
Note that Helium won't restore an app's data until you install (or restore) the app.
Since Helium doesn't work on most phones in recent versions of Android, Titanium Backup is an alternative (and a better app).
As far as passwords, the wifi passwords are kept in a file that can't be accessed unless the device is rooted and, even if it's accessed, the password is encrypted, so it's of no use. Use a good password safe (I use Keepass2Android Password Safe on my phone, KeePass on my computers, and the data file for all of them on a cloud account, so they all use the same file, and any change made on one device shows on all devices).
Everything else is pretty much just files in folders. Pictures are usually in a folder named DCIM (it stands for Digital Camera IMages). Copy the whole DCIM folder, so the folders under it stay in the same structure. (A folder shows up as an album in Gallery.) If you have pictures in other folders (like Pictures), copy those folders too. The same with videos, music, documents and anything else you don't want to lose.
There are enough free cloud accounts that you should be able to find at least 1TB of free cloud storage. Make 2 cloud backups and keep one on your local computer. There's no excuse for "I didn't have it backed up".
Everything else:
If I left anything out, please post in this thread (if you posted as a guest, you'll have to create a free account - don't worry, no one even looks at the information you put in, except for what you make public) and, if there's a way to back up what you have and I left out, I'll try to find it and add it to this post.
Now you ask "how can I get my data back?" About the same way you get your written notes back after you burned the papers and scattered the ashes to the wind. You don't.
So how do you make sure you don't lose your data if your phone gets damaged, stolen, wiped or something else catastrophic? (BTW, this doesn't apply only to phones. It's the same for any Android device.)
If you can install a custom recovery, like TWRP, you can back up the data partition any time you think the last data has changed enough since the last backup that the backup is outdated. Always copy the backup to another device, like your PC or laptop and, for insurance, to a cloud account. Then, if you have to replace the phone, you can just install TWRP on the new phone and restore the data in one shot. (CWM is another custom recovery, and it works about the same way, but one can't read the other's backups, they use different formats, so stick to one.)
If you don't want to do that (or you have a locked bootloader so you can't install a custom recovery, and there's no Safestrap for your phone [it inserts itself into the boot process and allows you to run a modified version of TWRP], or you don't want to install Safestrap), you have to back up each kind of data individually.
Contacts:
All your contacts should be entered as Google contacts. The default, unfortunately is Phone or Device. so the contacts don't get backed up to anywhere, so if the phone gets lost or damaged, so do your contacts. You have to change that for each contact you enter, as you enter it. Google doesn't allow that to be edited later. (Note: later versions of Android DO allow it to be edited.) Fortunately, there are at least two easy ways to fix that:
1) If you have a SIM in your phone (Edit: - you can use the phone's internal storage to do that), export (it's in the menu in the Contacts app) the contacts to the SIM card (or internal storage). Then import them (same menu), and you'll be able to choose your Google account. They're now Google contacts. You'll probably have duplicates. Delete the ones that aren't Google contacts - after checking thet the imported contacts imported all the data. If it didn't, manually add the missing data to the Google contact, then delete the Device contact.
2) If you don't have a SIM, install the MyPhoneExplorer app. Connect the phone to your computer (where you'll have installed the PC end of the app already) and connect to the phone. MyPhoneExplorer can use USB, WiFi or Bluetooth to connect, it's your choice. Sync your contacts from the phone to the PC. Now comes the tedious part. For each contact, copy it (the usual stuff - right-click/copy), then paste it. Open the one you just pasted and you'll find that Phone or Device is a dropdown and you can change it to Google. Save it and delete the original. Do that for every contact. On the phone, delete all your contacts. Now sync MyPhoneExplorer to the phone. When you edit a contact in the phone's Contact app, you'll see that it's a Google contact.
Now, whichever way you did it, go to Settings, to Accounts, to your Google (not GMail, they're different) account, and sync contacts if they don't show that they were just synced. (If syncing for contacts is disabled, enable it to sync. If it's enabled, it should have synced by the time you get there, or still be syncing.)
Now if you go to Google Contacts, you'll see all your contacts on the page. Any time you set up another phone with that Google account and have Contact syncing enabled, it'll sync between the phone and that page.
Phone Log:
If you want to back up your call logs, there's a free app for that - Call Logs Backup & Restore.
Calendar:
If you have calendar sync enabled, this will sync to the Google Calendar, and resync if the phone is replaced or wiped, so there's no need to save it separately.
EMail:
Email is saved on the email server if you have your email account (on your email provider's site) set as an IMAP account. (A POP3 account saves emails on the device, so you have to back up each one you want to keep individually.). You don't have to sync it. If you want to save the text of an email in a text file on the phone for some reason, copy the file to the PC, in the folder you keep the files you back up from the phone.
Texts:
You can use SMS Backup & Restore to back up all your messages.
Apps:
Anything you installed from the Play Store or Amazon Appstore is remembered, so you can install it again. Even if you paid for it, the fact that you paid for it for that phone is remembered. (In the Play Store, the "Install" button will say "Installed", but that just means that you already installed that app. Press it and it will install the app again.) But installing 100 apps takes a lot of download time, so back your apps up. I use App Backup & Restore. It creates .apk files as backups. Those are the files that install the apps, so if you want to uninstall an app because you're not using it much, or you need to free up some space, then later on you want to reinstall it, you just find the .apk file, tap it and the app will install. If you're restoring all of them, install App Backup & Restore first, then you can install all the archived apps in 2 taps (well, 3, really - you don't want to install App Backup & Restore, so you tap to enable them all, tap to disable App Backup & Restore, then tap Install.) (Make sure you copy the App_Backup_Restore folder to your PC.
Apk Extractor is another good app backup app. It doesn't give you the restore menu, but it's small and fast.
Apps save data. A game may save your current status, an app to keep a record of car maintenance may keep a record of what's been done when, etc. and you'll want to save that data. Helium will do that. It needs a rooted phone to work, but if the phone isn't rooted, it'll tell you to download a file to your PC. That gets around the fact that the phone's not rooted. You can back up apps as well as data in Helium, but it backs apps up in its own format, so if you want to reinstall just one app, you have to have Helium installed too - and if the phone's not rooted, and you just installed Helium to install that one app, you'll have to connect the phone to the PC so Helium can get its permission again. Helium's folder is named carbon. Save that to your PC (and your cloud account) too.
Note that Helium won't restore an app's data until you install (or restore) the app.
Since Helium doesn't work on most phones in recent versions of Android, Titanium Backup is an alternative (and a better app).
As far as passwords, the wifi passwords are kept in a file that can't be accessed unless the device is rooted and, even if it's accessed, the password is encrypted, so it's of no use. Use a good password safe (I use Keepass2Android Password Safe on my phone, KeePass on my computers, and the data file for all of them on a cloud account, so they all use the same file, and any change made on one device shows on all devices).
Everything else is pretty much just files in folders. Pictures are usually in a folder named DCIM (it stands for Digital Camera IMages). Copy the whole DCIM folder, so the folders under it stay in the same structure. (A folder shows up as an album in Gallery.) If you have pictures in other folders (like Pictures), copy those folders too. The same with videos, music, documents and anything else you don't want to lose.
There are enough free cloud accounts that you should be able to find at least 1TB of free cloud storage. Make 2 cloud backups and keep one on your local computer. There's no excuse for "I didn't have it backed up".
Everything else:
If I left anything out, please post in this thread (if you posted as a guest, you'll have to create a free account - don't worry, no one even looks at the information you put in, except for what you make public) and, if there's a way to back up what you have and I left out, I'll try to find it and add it to this post.
Last edited:
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