What will backup save

Samsung also offers Smart Switch , an app that lets you back up your smartphone onto a Windows or Mac computer. It makes it easy for anyone switching to a Samsung phone to copy over all their data. Sadly, although Smart Switch backups can be made from most smartphones, they can only be restored to Samsung phones. Backing Up to Google. Simon Hill has been writing about tech for more than a decade.

Before writing, he worked in games development. If you take a lot of photos, and especially if you take a lot of videos, your storage dwindles quickly. To find out how much storage you have, and how much is available, go to Settings, tap your name, then tap iCloud. You can see in the screenshot above that most of my storage is used by my Photos library.

Go back to the previous screen; here you see toggles for apps using iCloud. Scroll down to iCloud Backup and toggle it On. However, the backup may be too large for your available storage, or it may reduce your storage so much that you need to make more room. After the first backup has completed, go back to the Manage Storage screen, tap Backups, then tap your device.

You see here when the last backup was performed, how large it is, how large the next backup will be, and then you see a list of apps that want to back up data. This list is important: it shows which apps back up data as part of your iCloud backups, and how much space they take up. In the above screenshot, you can see the largest amount of data is from Bear , an app I use to store notes.

The next app in the list is Audible ; the At best, these apps are storing settings; but does the Netflix app need to story 46 MB of data just for settings? Since so many apps already store data in the cloud, or on their own servers, much of what gets backed up here is redundant.

It uses potentially valuable iCloud storage though if you have 2 TB, you may have plenty of room , takes longer to back up, and especially takes a lot longer to restore, if you need to do so. As I said above, iCloud backups occur automatically. Your first iCloud backup can take a considerable amount of time, depending on the speed of your internet connection and the size of the backup.

With a Wi-Fi network connection, you can back up your device using iCloud. You don't need to plug your device into a computer to back up with iCloud. Learn how to back up your device using iCloud or how to manage iCloud storage and delete backups that you no longer need.

If you turn on iCloud Photos , your content is also automatically stored in iCloud. A computer backup of your device, which is not the same as a sync , includes almost all of your device's data and settings. A backup from a computer doesn't include:. During the initial device setup wizard, the user is shown a list of available backup datasets and is asked which one to restore the data from. Whichever backup dataset is selected becomes the ancestral dataset for the device.

The device can restore from either its own backups or the ancestral dataset. The device prioritizes its own backup if backups from both sources are available. If the user didn't go through the device setup wizard, then the device can restore only from its own backups. To simplify testing, Android includes tools that let you manually initiate a restore of your app. Apps that target Android 6. In your app manifest file, set the boolean value android:allowBackup to enable or disable backup.

The default value is true but to make your intentions clear, we recommend explicitly setting the attribute in your manifest as shown below:. You can disable backups by setting android:allowBackup to false.

You might want to do this if your app can recreate its state through some other mechanism or if your app deals with sensitive information that Android shouldn't back up. By default, the system backs up almost all app data. For more information, see Files that are backed up. This section shows you how to define custom XML rules to control what gets backed up.

If your app targets Android 12 API level 31 or higher, you must specify an additional set of XML backup rules to support the changes to backup restore that were introduced for devices running Android 12 or higher. Follow the steps in this section to include or exclude files that are backed up on devices running Android 11 API level 30 or lower. In AndroidManifest. This attribute points to an XML file that contains backup rules.

For example:. The following sample backs up all shared preferences except device. If your app saves sensitive information on the device, you can specify conditions under which your app's data is included in the user's backup. You can add the following conditions in Android 9 API level 28 or higher:. If you've upgraded your development devices to Android 9, you need to disable and then re-enable data backup after upgrading. This is because Android only encrypts backups with a client-side secret after informing users in Settings or the Setup Wizard.

If your app targets Android 12 API level 31 or higher, follow the steps in this section to include or exclude files that are backed up on devices that are running Android 12 or higher. The XML syntax for the configuration file varies depending on the version of Android that your app is targeting and running on:. Use the following XML syntax for the configuration file that controls backup for devices running Android 11 or lower.

If your app targets Android 12 API level 31 or higher, use the following XML syntax for the configuration file that controls backup for devices running Android 12 or higher.

This separation allows you, for example, to exclude a file or directory from Google Drive backups while still transferring it during device-to-device D2D transfers. This may be useful if you have files which would be too large to back up to the cloud, but which can be transferred between devices without issue. Specifies a file or folder to backup. By default, Auto Backup includes almost all app files. On Android 11 and lower , this element can also contain the requireFlags attribute, which the section describing how to define conditional requirements for backup discusses in more detail.

Specifies a file or folder to exclude during backup. Here are some files that are typically excluded from backup:. Files that have device specific identifiers, either issued by a server or generated on the device. For example, Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM needs to generate a registration token every time a user installs your app on a new device.

If the old registration token is restored, the app may behave unexpectedly. Account credentials or other sensitive information.

Consider asking the user to reauthenticate the first time they launch a restored app rather than allowing for storage of such information in the backup. Apps that implement Auto Backup do not need to implement a BackupAgent. However, you can optionally implement a custom BackupAgent. Typically, there are two reasons for doing this:. You want to receive notification of backup events, such as onRestoreFinished and onQuotaExceeded long, long.

These callback methods are executed even if the app is not running. You can't easily express the set of files you want to backup with XML rules. To retain the system's default implementation, call the corresponding method on the superclass with super. To use the file-based Auto Backup instead, set the android:fullBackupOnly attribute to true in your app's manifest.

During auto backup and restore operations, the system launches the app in a restricted mode to both prevent the app from accessing files that could cause conflicts and let the app execute callback methods in its BackupAgent.

In this restricted mode, the app's main activity is not automatically launched, its Content Providers are not initialized, and the base-class Application is instantiated instead of any subclass declared in the app's manifest. Your BackupAgent must implement the abstract methods onBackup and onRestore , which are used for key-value backup.

If you don't want to perform key-value backup, you can just leave your implementation of those methods blank.

For more information, see Extend BackupAgent. Content and code samples on this page are subject to the licenses described in the Content License. App Basics. Build your first app. App resources. Resource types. App manifest file. Device compatibility. Multiple APK support. Tablets, large screens, and foldables. Build responsive UIs.

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