Syncing Google Account on Galaxy S5 in preparation for transfer to a new phone

[Android Central Question]

I finally got a new phone to replace my S5, but I've been trying forever (okay, about an hour) to sync my phone with Google Drive. It shows that some of the items, such as contacts and calendar, have synced, but a number of the other ones have the sync symbol next to them. I assume it's still syncing because if I go into the menu, I have the option to stop sync.

Is this normal or should I try to find a different way to sync my phone. This is the method recommended by my carrier. Do I need free space in order to sync?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! There's no actual sync to Google Drive per se -- what method are you trying? What you see in the Backups section of Google Drive are backed up data from the system (including system settings, wi-fi passwords, etc.), call logs, SMS messages, and a list of the apps installed. The actual app data may or may not be backed up to Google Drive -- that's dependent on the app developer, and if they took advantage of this feature.

If your contacts were saved to your Google account (and not the local Phone account or the Samsung account), then they should have automatically synced to your Google Contacts in the cloud -- you can go to contacts.google.com on your computer browser to see if the contacts are there. Similarly, if the calendar events were saved specifically to your Google account (and not the local Phone account or Samsung account calendar), then those get synced automatically to your Google Calendar in the cloud. If you didn't use your Google account, it can be a bit of a hassle to get them there -- it involves exporting the data to a file, and then importing that file into your Google account.