Ask HN: How do you backup your Android?

NeoBackup on FDroid is what I used before grapheneOS (where I'm not rooted)

The problem with Takeout is it removes the metadata from your photos. Google wants you locked in to Google Photos. Years ago they also removed the ability to sync with Google Drive, so the only way to get your photos out without losing metadata is to download them directly from photos.google.com, 50 at a time

Beware when relying on Google Takeout for e-mail backup if you have old e-mails in other encodings than utf-8 : it permanently breaks some characters, which are replaced by 0xEFBFBD (that issue does not occur when doing backup with IMAP or GMVault)

It has an export function that you can scan from an old phone. And I kept the setup keys in my keepass database.

On top of that now Google backs those up for you too.

Plenty of TOTP apps that sync (including google)

It does do that similarly to Authy now doesn't it? I saw a thread here recently with people arguing it broke MFA to do so.

I use a self-hosted Bitwarden instance for that kind of stuff and before that I used Aegis + Synchthing.

Google already automatically backs up secrets to your Google Account

aegis plus syngcthing fork works well

aegis authenticator uses google's android backup system.

Synchthing on Android is End of life, alas https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...

> I used Nextcloud sync in the past, but found it unreliable.

What was wrong about nextcloud sync? I'm just about to set it up for myself.

I just restored my backups a few weeks ago when I bought a new phone. It doesn't work for all apps (I knew it, it's far from the first time I do that) but I am satisfied with the results.

It does help sometimes for retrieving some data manually by digging through the backup files (used it recently for retrieving all invoices from a service that were otherwise only available one by one through a painfully complicated process).

Since your phone is rooted, how do you manage banking apps and other things that don't like working on a rooted device? How much work is involved in getting those to work?

Just install a couple Magisk modules and your banking app should work fine. At least mine does.

It's true that it makes some things more complicated, but it's a trade-off that I'm willing to make for the convenience and security of hosting my own backups.

Banking web apps usually, mostly work just fine. The one exception is depositing checks. It's pretty rare that I need to do that these days, though.

I'm not rooted anymore, but my banking app worked fine when I was. Only the health insurance app (TK) had issues

Play Integrity Fix.

Can you share resources on how to backup through termux? I hadn't thought of that.

I read your sources, and one, as a user, I'll let these people sort out their drama among themselves, two, the security issues of the apps that are downloaded I think are way higher potentially than the ones in F-Droid in itself. With these considerations, F-droid is fine as a way of installing apps. Just as fine as any other technically imperfect service, business, or product that we use daily. In fact, I consider it higher than average in quality.

Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean bigger possibility of apps containg malware or what?

Why is it insecure?

I just went from Pixel to Motorola and this has worked surprisingly well. Even for apps that I install manually.

That said, if I don't use the old phone to pull "the data" Google will not transfer more important things (Wi-Fis), settings etc.

What is app data? I guess maybe everything I use is already in the cloud anyway, so I never noticed that?

I am an Android guy but this is one of the things that iPhone does much much better.

It doesn't work for every app. Not sure if it's opt-in or opt-out.

i have no idea... all i did was to click in 'Copy Location' on the 3 dots icon ^-^

I see your point, but from the perspective of the Android phone, this is already a backup. This is because if I lose the phone, I can restore the important parts of its state from the copy on the server - which is the definition of a backup, according to Wikipedia for example.

Now, of course, we can look at more stringent approaches to backing up data, which I already do, but for some reason I didn't elaborate on the original comment. My home server uses ZFS as storage, and I snapshot that from time to time, and I sync those snapshots to another, otherwise offline ZFS storage. The true 3-2-1 I still don't achieve, because both the online and the offline copies are at the same site, but I opted to take this risk.