Factory Data Reset question

[Ag76]

My Razr Maxx HD and my wife's Razr HD both seem to suffering from increased battery usage since the KitKat upgrade. My wife is not too happy with me anyway for upgrading her phone since she was perfectly happy with it, and now she's lost a few things she liked.

So I'm thinking I should do a factory data reset on my phone first (then I'll do the wife's after I figure out if it helps on mine), but hate to start over getting my phone back to the way I now have it setup. I noticed in Settings, Backup & Reset, there is a "Back up my data" option. Does anyone know what is backed up in this option?

If I remember correctly, Gmail will save my contacts and reinstall them when I log back in after a reset. Is this correct? Will it also remember the apps I have installed, or do I need to make a list so I can reinstall them after the reset.

I have lots of photos of my grandkids texted to me by my family members, and I've already gone through those texts and saved the photos I want to keep to the SD card. I'm going to go through my files in file explorer and make sure there aren't any photos still in the phones storage that would be lost.

I'd appreciate any help and advice in making sure I've backed up settings, contacts, apps, etc. before doing the reset. I'm sure I'll forget something I can't recover after doing the reset.

 

[Rukbat]

Your contacts (if you set the phone up properly they're all "account" or "Google" contacts, NOT phone or SIM contacts) are at Google Contacts As soon as you put that gmail address into ANY Android phone it will sync your contacts to the phone.

Check your Account (in Settings) setting for your Google account - everything in the account that's checked will be synced to the cloud, and will reload onto your phone.

Data from apps (like game scores) will not be saved - each game saves them differently and you have to save them (to someplace not on the internal storage of the phone) yourself. (If they save to internal storage, connect the phone to the computer and copy those files to the computer.) The same with documents, pictures, videos, music, etc., unless you have them saved to the cloud already.

There's an old saying in the industry (it's about as old as files - I know, I'm older than the first general purpose electronic computer, and it feels as if I've been in computing almost that long) that goes, "any file you don't have backed up to at least 2 independent devices is a file you don't need". (Cloud accounts count as devices these days.) So everything you want to keep should already be backed up. (Forget about factory resetting - if your computer gets lost, stolen or falls into a lake or under the wheel of a moving car, any data not backed up is gone forever. The phone can be replaced - the data can't. We see so many people here who lost the pics of their baby's first steps or the video of their child's first words. BACK-IT-UP as if backing up were a religion and you'd go to a hot place if you didn't.)

A word of advice from one married man to another? Never touch your wife's phone unless she asks you to do something with or to it. And I mean touch. Don't move it to the other side of the desk. If SHE spills something on it, it's YOUR fault - because she thought the phone was on the other side. (I've even stopped suggesting which apps my wife might find useful. She just recently added her email account to email - she refused to use it on her phone, but it's warm now and we're usually at the other end of the house from her laptop, so it was HER idea.)

 

[Ag76]

Rukbat, thanks for the advice. I've learned the hard way to never touch my wife's phone again. I had to put a mSD card in her phone because she'd filled up the storage with photos and videos of the grandkids, and I moved all her photos to the card. She mentioned that now the photos are not in the same order as they were when viewed in the gallery. Sheesh, I can't win...

A word of advice from one married man to another? Never touch your wife's phone unless she asks you to do something with or to it. And I mean touch. Don't move it to the other side of the desk. If SHE spills something on it, it's YOUR fault - because she thought the phone was on the other side. (I've even stopped suggesting which apps my wife might find useful. She just recently added her email account to email - she refused to use it on her phone, but it's warm now and we're usually at the other end of the house from her laptop, so it was HER idea.)