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Google's issues with Android backups are more apparent than ever
Google's backups have been a long-standing issue for Android users, causing frustration and inconvenience when trying to restore their devices
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Users continue to encounter frustrating issues when trying to deploy Android Backup. It’s an ongoing concern, one that hasn’t been addressed to the satisfaction of the digital search powerhouse known as Google, not to mention the actual users themselves. Recently, only compounding the problem, a kernel bug locked some of the Android faithful out, cutting them off from their data. What’s to be done in a situation like this? Typically, while awaiting the rollout of a fix, factory resets and data backups come to the rescue.
How to back up your iPhone with or without iCloud
Using your iPhone without data backup is never a good idea
While you take extra care of your expensive iPhone with a screen protector and a case, a fatal incident can leave you with a broken display or a potential data loss. Since your iPhone stores your messages, photos, conversations, files, and other data, we recommend backing up the essential data with Apple's cloud storage or the desktop.
In a market dominated by Gmail and Outlook, AOL email's popularity rapidly shrunk, and as a result, the company exchanged a few hands in the last few years. Acquired by Verizon in 2015, the carrier eventually sold AOL and Yahoo to a private equity firm in May 2021. If you are on the fence about moving on from AOL mail, export and back up your important emails on your hard drive, PC, or a top Chromebook.
You have multiple options when backing up your Android phone, from the official first-party methods to some well-known third-party alternatives. If you get one of the best Android budget phones, you'll want to back up your files from the old phone first. To keep this process as simple as possible, you might use a cloud-based solution with automatic backups that manage themselves. At the same time, you can also create local backups and manually store them offline somewhere for extra ease of mind. In this guide, we cover various examples of how to back up your Android phone.
How to back up your Android phone or tablet
Back up your data to the cloud, a flash drive, or a computer
For most of us, the majority of our important data lives in the cloud. However, your phone or tablet might still have some information that's never made its way to Google's servers.
How to transfer files and data from an old Android phone to a new one
Thankfully, Google makes sure this is a fairly simple process
When you're ready to transfer your files and data from an old Android phone to a new one, you'll want to ensure a seamless transition. In this guide, we'll show you how to transfer everything from your old phone using Google's backup and restore feature, as well as how to create automatic backups to keep everything safe should anything happen to your phone in the future.
WhatsApp encrypted backups will let users balance their own privacy and security priorities
If you want to remember a 64-digit encryption key, that's totally up to you
There's no shortage of reasons for why WhatsApp is as popular as it is, but the service's focus on user privacy has got to be one of the big ones. With end-to-end encrypted messages, people using the app can feel secure that their messages are headed right to the eyes of their intended recipient, without the risk of any looky-loos peeking along the way. Now Facebook's talking about its plans for taking that kind of protection to its next logical step, as end-to-end encryption expands to cover WhatsApp backups.
All the ways to save and instantly access your Covid vaccine card on your phone
Access a digital backup with a single tap right from your home screen
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A Covid-19 Vaccination Record Card provides proof that you've been vaccinated, but you're no longer limited to carrying around a flimsy piece of paper. Digital vaccine passports have become more accessible throughout the summer as healthcare providers and individual states have implemented their own methods. With these updated digital passes, physical cards are often no longer required, though you should keep your sheet as a backup no matter what. Let's look at the current state of how vaccine passports work on Android, as well as an easy way to save a backup copy to your phone — complete with a shortcut accessible from your home screen.
How to hack a GPS into your DSLR camera using Google Photos
Make sure your camera's clock is set correctly, though
It's almost shocking the extent to which smartphones have replaced dedicated cameras in many of our lives. Between the advanced optics, next-level image processing, and being able to share pics with just a couple taps, who would ever dream about lugging around an old-fashioned point-and-shoot digicam? But for as far we've come, there's still a lot of appeal in larger, more flexible cameras, with their big sensors and interchangeable lenses. As it turns out, you can use your phone to bring a little bit of extra smarts to even a dumb DSLR, helping to modernize your Google Photos pics with GPS info.
WhatsApp is still working on password-protected Google Drive backups
The encrypted backups have been coming for a long time
It's been almost exactly a year since the last time we saw leaked screenshots of an encrypted cloud backup feature for WhatsApp. Today we see a more fleshed-out version of that tool, offering a password protected backup of your messages that uploads to Google Drive on Android and iCloud on iOS. Unfortunately, there's still no indication of when it's actually going to go live.
Google Recorder now has a companion web app for storage and sharing
You'll need the latest v2.2 update
Google Recorder has quickly become one of the best audio recording applications on Android, even though it's only officially available on Google's own Pixel phones. Backup support was announced earlier this week, and now it's finally rolling out.
Google Photos is ending free unlimited photo storage for non-Pixels
Get ready to cough up the cash for a paid Google One account
One of Google Photos' biggest perks is being nerfed next year. Unlimited "high-quality" photo backup is going away for non-Pixel phones as of June 1st, 2021. Folks using Google Photos to back up photos on other phones will see all uploads after that date count against shared Google storage.
The Google Recorder app could soon allow syncing with Drive
Obviating the need to manually back up your recordings
Google Recorder is already a pretty neat solution to live transcribe your voice notes with near-perfect accuracy right on Pixel phones. The app picked up a ton of features earlier this week with its second big update, and it doesn’t look like Google is willing to stop there. A new teardown reveals an unannounced feature in Recorder that could let users automatically back up their recordings to Google Drive.
Android's backup and restore features still haven't caught up to the iPhone
If Apple can get it right, why can't Google?
Android’s built-in backup system has improved immensely over the years, but it still falls short in a number of key areas, leading to much frustration for users. Its shortcomings are even more apparent when compared with Apple’s iCloud backup for iPhones, which — while not perfect — is better at copying over app data so users don’t have to spend hours setting up a new phone.
After years of using mostly stock-Android phones, I bought a Galaxy S10e for myself a few months ago, and I've used it almost every day since that point. While the software experience isn't perfect, Samsung does usually provide options to disable functionality I don't care for. However, there's one software quirk that can't easily be fixed: screenshots are constantly backed up to my Google Photos library.
I love flagship phones, but I'm always a little concerned when I take one with me, say, kayaking, or to a concert. Summertime is full of such potentially phone-ruining events, so if you're worried about the safety of your thousand-dollar pocket computer, consider grabbing one of these cheapo alternatives as a backup.
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- Reader binaya bajracharya has this special gallery view already. As you can see in the screenshot below, it's a standalone page that only shows the non-backed up photos (like the changelog explained). You can select any photos and upload them right away. This is different from the cloud indicator we had a couple of years ago and that's still there on iOS, as it's separate from your main gallery and you don't need to scroll through thousands of photos looking for a tiny icon to find the ones that could possibly still be pending. I think this is better and can't wait for Google to roll it out to everyone.
There was a point a year or more ago where Google Photos had a neat indicator on top of each media item that showed whether or not it was backed up. Thanks to it, you could always tell at a glance which photo or video had been uploaded and which ones were still pending. That indicator disappeared completely, but the Photos team has finally realized the extent of its mistake by removing it, so it's bringing the functionality back.
The recent addition of Linux app support to Chromebooks has made the laptops much more useful, especially in the eyes of developers. However, if you needed to wipe or upgrade your Chromebook, there wasn't an easy way to keep your Linux data. Previous code commits hinted at the ability to back up and restore the Linux container, and now that functionality has arrived in the Dev Channel.
An update to Google Photos began rolling out late last night. There appears to be nothing noteworthy on the surface, but a teardown has turned up a couple interesting details that point to upcoming changes. We will be getting some new informative boxes that can explain why backups aren't running, plus we may finally get back the much loved option to only perform backups while charging.