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The line between a computer and a smartphone has blurred to the point of being indistinguishable over the past year or so, and not just from a technical perspective. The way we think of phones and the way we use them is more and more PC-like all the time. People create work documents on phones, capture one-time moments as photographs and cherish them, store thousands of personal messages. This is important data, and it needs to be backed up.
iOS and BlackBerry
Apple’s iOS is the best of the mobile bunch, with a full backup and restore feature built in to iOS and executed through iTunes. Likewise, RIM’s BlackBerry OS is well protected, with a similar feature in its BlackBerry Desktop Manager. This software will back-up all of your important data, and if you lose your phone you can re-establish your digital life by using this backup data with a new handset.
Google and Microsoft, however, are well behind the times in this regard.
Windows Phone
Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS is the worst offender, with absolutely no backup option available. The Zune desktop client syncs photos that you’ve taken with your PC, and contact data is duplicated on your Windows Live account. However, as it stands today, if you lose your phone, you lose everything else. All of your messages, your settings, your bookmarks and the apps you’ve downloaded, plus the data that goes with each of these, will be gone.
This is something that concerns a great many Windows Phone users, and luckily some of these concerned parties are also software programmers. We’ve come across a handful of unofficial Windows Phone backup and restore programs, the best of which is called WP Easy Backup Beta by XDA Developers forum member MarcHoover.
(Credit: XDA Developers forum)
There are a few disclaimers that go with this program, including a standard “this could break your phone and that’s not my fault” style of warning, but we’ve tested it out using the Nokia Lumia 800 (sorry, Nokia), and it worked without a hiccup. It takes about 20 minutes to back-up, and slightly longer to restore, but once completed we found that it had successfully reinstalled everything just as we’d left it, including apps.
Interestingly, the software restores data specific to each device. We attempted to restore the data from the Nokia Lumia 800 with an HTC Mozart handset, but the app instead found an old Mozart restore file in our system and turned back the clock on our apps and settings. Still, we don’t imagine that this would be much of an issue for many users.
Android
Google does back-up some data to the cloud, including bookmarks, Wi-Fi passwords, Gmail data (contacts, calendar, etc) and a list of downloaded apps that it will attempt to restore if you wipe your phone or log-in to a new phone. To take advantage of this backup feature, you have to make sure that the option is turned on in the Privacy category in the main settings menu, and that your Google account is set to automatically sync the services you want backed up in the Accounts and Sync category of settings. You can also set photos to automatically upload to Google Plus by using its app.
If you use an Android smartphone, but you’d like a more robust backup option, there’s a selection of third-party apps that can handle the job with a variety of different features to choose from. One thing to remember, though, is that application data for the apps you download is stored on a restricted part of the phone’s internal memory, and it cannot be accessed by other apps, like backup tools, unless the phone has been rooted. If you don’t know what rooting an Android phone means (and, no, it’s not what you’re thinking), then it would be safer for you to just assume that you can’t back-up app data.
MyBackup Pro
Matching a robust service with a clean user interface, MyBackup Pro is among the best backup options for Android. The app can back-up contacts, call logs, messages, calendars, settings, bookmarks, home-screen layouts, user-defined dictionaries, alarms and music playlists.
It also offers the option to back-up your data to a server hosted by the development company Rerware, which could be a good idea if you don’t have any really sensitive data on your phone. Alternatively, you can back-up to an SD card in the phone, and then manually sync it with a cloud service of your choice. Finally, there is a scheduling option to automatically update the backup as often as you like.
Sprite Backup
Sprite Backup is another excellent solution, this time with an option to push a scheduled update to either Dropbox or Box.net.
If you’d like a faster, simpler backup, there are apps that focus on specific collections of data, like call logs and messaging. These are often free, but have limited usability.
If you have a Dropbox account, another really handy tool to consider is Dropsync. It works like the Dropbox client on a PC, by analysing folders you nominate and syncing changes with your account in the cloud. There is a free version, which allows you to keep one folder in sync, and a Pro version, offering multiple folder sync, for AU$5.99.
