• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Backup query needs explanation !!

Inzera

Newbie
Jun 26, 2021
11
9
I have a Mediatek tablet - a generic Chinese job. It performs the automatic backup to Drive every night, fine. The big problem is that although I have about 80 apps installed on the tablet, Drive always shows only 12 have been backed up. Obviously for the backup to be useful I need ALL the apps backed up. I cannot even see any way to select individual apps for inclusion into the backup.

Any ideas, anyone?? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 
The backup to Drive is done on the native OS system backup facility (mine is Android V.6). II like the idea of backing up to Google Drive because I understand that, in the event of having to restore evrything after ie. a factory reset, the Drive restore will put everything back as it was without loading and installing each app individually.

The apps backed up are mostly Google apps but there's 2 or 3 third party apps there as well. All my apps have originally been downloaded from Play Store

Alternatively, is there any other app(s) or way to backup to Google Drive ??. I know I can copy all apps to my PC but that's not as easy way to restore them to the Tablet.
 
Upvote 0
Hmm, the only "native system backup facility" in Android is a backup of app data (not the apps themselves) that Google offer, currently called "Backup to Google One" on my phone. Personally I don't really trust that: it currently tells me it's backing up half of my apps, but doesn't provide an obvious way of telling which half. Is that the thing you are using?

If not I suspect it might be a manufacturer app (though I will disclose here that Android 6 is the only Android version between 1.5 and 11 that I've not used myself, so there's always a chance there's a feature of that version specifically that I've not met!).

To be honest the only wholly reliable way of backing up both apps and their data that I know and have used requires root (Titanium Backup). I did, a long time ago, use MyBackup Pro, but that required root to back up some things. There's an app called Helium in the Play Store that can back up most stuff to a computer (it uses adb backup under the hood, though some apps can declare that they should be excluded from that). I don't know about Google Drive, but as I recall it's a manual process rather than automated. I gather that it doesn't work well with modern Android versions, but it should be OK with Android 6 (I used it to migrate data from Android 5.1 to Android 8 when Google's transfer tool on my Pixel failed to work).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dannydet
Upvote 0
The logic of the Google backup is that the apps can be re-downloaded so it's the data backup that's important. But I don't know why it doesn't back everything up (at least for me) - to be honest for many years I rooted all of my devices so it didn't matter to me whether it worked or not, and after one poor experience with it I never bothered with it again, and hence never learned whether there are any tweaks with it.

I've known others swear that it's great, but I suspect that it just worked for them and so they won't have ideas. But we can hope.
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones