Your Android phone is more than just a communication device. It contains information of a personal or business nature that is essential to your daily life. Yet all too often you find that people will lose data too easily on their device. The data can be lost through accidental deletion, accidental formatting of external storage devices such as SD cards and damage to the device itself. Having a backup of your device is one of the ways to ensure that you can gain access to this data even if it lost from your device. There are several ways you can backup your device but one of the most popular ways is backing up to Google.
Android devices in particular can be very easily backed up on Google. In this article we are going to be looking at how to backup Android to Google, what exactly can be contained in the backup and how you can view the backup in Google.
By default, Google backs up certain types of data automatically. Most of the time these are the types of data that Google associates with Google services you use. They include;
Google will not automatically backup SMS messages, Game progress, login information and App settings. Google will also not automatically backup Google Authenticator data for security reasons.
It is important to note that Google does allow you to sync and backup Android to Google with most of the important data on your phone. You can sync all app data, calendar, browser data, contacts, photos, music and Gmail data and even Wi-Fi password and device settings
To back-up most of you Google related data go to Settings> Accounts> Google> and then check everything you want to sync.
To backup device settings and other data such as Wi-Fi asswords go to settings> Backup & Reset. Check “Backup my Data” and then Automatic restore. This will ensure that all settings and passwords will be saved on Google servers.
You can then easily access and restore the data on Google servers.
The files that are created by backups are XML files which can be viewed in any web browser as well as opened MS Excel. You can view these files in three different ways using a backup reader, open in a web browser or open it in MS Excel. Let’s see how to view your backup in each of these three ways.
XtNetwroks is working on a Java based viewer that will allow backup files to be viewable on a computer. Currently this system works by displaying threaded conversations on Linux, OSX and Windows systems. It can also be used to export messages to text files.
You can find out more information here
This method will not work on Chrome or Firefox for security reasons.in order to allow the files to be viewable on the web browser you need to make sure that the preferences are for “Add XSL Tag” and “Add Readable Date” in the preferences are checked in the app before creating the backup. Once you have done that, follow these simple steps.
Step 1 Copy the backup file to a folder on your computer and open the xml file in the browser.
The browser will now display it in a friendly HTML format.
MS Excel can also be used to view backup files. Here’s how to do that.
Step 1 Open Excel select file> open and in the drop down menu select XML Files (*.xml)
Step 2 Select the file from the list and then open it. Choose “Open without applying a style sheet”
Step 3 When requested to select how you would like to open the file, select “As an XML table”
You should be able to view the file in MS Excel although if you edit the file in this column the program may not allow you to Export it back to XML.
It is important to note that the above methods may not work for all kinds of backup files. In most cases you are not able to view backup files except for sms backup files and call logs. Therefore the methods discussed above are for backup files that contain SMS messages, call logs and contacts.
The importance of a backup cannot be stressed enough. A backup gives you the peace of mind when you know that your data will be in a safe place to be accessed and restored when needed. As we have seen Google makes it very easy for Android users to create backups for various data types on their devices by creating these backups automatically. Those types of data that Google will not backup automatically can be easily synced with a Google Account. Restoring the files from your Google account is also just as easy. The hard part comes in when you want to view the contents of your backup file. This cannot be done for some files although there are ways as we have seen in part 3 above to view backup files that contain Call logs and SMS messages.
Step 1 Launch Wondershare TunesGo and connect your Android phone or tablet to PC.
Step 2 Select Information tap. In the contact management window, select group from which you want to export and backup contacts, including your Phone Contacts, SIM Contacts and Accont Contacts.
Step 3 Choose all or selected contacts you want to export. Click Export and select one from the 4 options: to vCard File, to CSV File, to Windows Address Book and to Outlook 2010/2013/2016. You can import contacts to Google directly from csv and vcard files on computer.
Step 4 Import contacts from computer to Gmail.
Mar 24,2021 15:47 pm / Posted by Christine Smith to Android Backup