How to backup your Android device

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How to backup your Android device

Android is tailor-made for syncing with cloud services, so wherever possible, use online services for core needs like email, contacts and calendar. On Android, Google's Sync Services feature will backup contacts, email, calendar and bookmarks if you're using the default (or Google made) apps associated with each of these.

Android can now also back up a lot of critical app data — a feature that's gotten better over time — but it's not quite as thorough as what you'll see on iOS. As such, it's best to take a two-pronged approach to backing up and Android device.

Enabling Backups

The first simple step is to enable Android's built-in backup feature, if you haven't already. To check, head into Settings > Backup and reset and make sure both 'Back up my data' as well as 'Automatic restore' are checked.

Helium: Granting access

Install Helium from the Google Play Store. If your handset is rooted, just install the app and you're good to go. If not, there's a couple of additional steps required to give Helium the correct access it needs for backup.

The first of these is to enable USB debugging on your phone. Go to Settings > Developer Options > USB Debugging. If you can't see a 'Developer Options' entry, which is hidden by default on many handsets, go to Settings > About Phone and tap 'Build number' seven times to unhide the entry.

Next, download and install the Helium Desktop client on your computer. Launch it, then follow the instructions, plugging in your Android device via USB when prompted and launching the Helium app.

Helium: Setting it up

Once you've got Helium's access rights sorted, you can make back ups (and restore them) from your phone or tablet's internal storage, or a microSD card, if your device has a slot. You can also copy these backups to your PC for safekeeping.

For ever better backup security, Helium will let you save backups directly to the cloud using Dropbox, Google Drive or Box — the caveat is that if you want to *restore* a cloud backup, you'll need to purchase the Premium version of Helium, which costs US$4.79. Google accounts all come with 15GB of free cloud storage on Google Drive, which should be enough for your app data.

Helium: Backing up app data

Backing up in Helium is a simple matter of selecting the apps you'd like to save data from (the little window that shows 'Buy premium' contains a list of all installed apps), then tapping 'Backup' and choosing a destination.

Unless you've got a humungous microSD card inside your device, we'd recommend leaving the default 'App Data Only (smaller backups)' option checked. If you uncheck this, Helium will back up a copy of the application (as an apk file) alongside the data — the only real reason for doing this full backup is if you want to avoid re-downloading an app from the Play Store.

Note that some app types, such as for podcasting, often have large media files associated with them, which means they can take some time to back up — and will consume more storage space than most other apps.

So, select the individual apps you want to back up, or tap 'Select all' down the bottom to just do everything, then tap 'Backup', choose a destination (we've used 'Internal storage' here) and wait for the backup to complete.

Your backups are stored in a folder on storage device you've selected called 'carbon' — we'd recommend copy this to your PC for safekeeping, as it'll be deleted if you ever have to reset your phone.

Helium: Backing up to your computer

You can also back up directly to your PC or Mac. Tap the 'three dots' icon at the top right and then 'PC download'. Then, in your PC's web browser, type the address shown and you'll be given a web-based interface that mirrors what's on Android.

When you perform a backup this way, your browser with download and save a file called backup.zip, so place this somewhere safe.

Helium: Restoring from a backup

To restore an older backup, swipe right and tap on the storage location where your backup is saved. You'll be presented with a list of apps, which you can select from, or tap the blue box icon at the bottom left to show the 'Select all' button. When you're ready, tap Restore to recover the backed up data.

Note that if you want to delete the backup for a specific app, tap and hold on an app's entry in the list until you see a 'Delete Backup' prompt, then tap OK.