I did a operating system upgrade on my Samsung Moment this week. Before I did the upgrade I backed up some of the stuff on my phone like my text messages.
First, the Android phone syncs to my gmail account, so much of the “stuff” on the phone is inheriently backed up, living “in the cloud” as they call it these days. Also, much of the ‘other stuff’ like photos are saved to the SD card, which the upgrade didn’t touch, so they are safe as well.
This left the actual applications, texts, and call history on the built in memory to get erased as part of the upgrade.
I had 60 different applications installed on my phone. About a third are great, gotta haves, a third are used when I get bored, want to show the phone off, whatever, and the rest are duplicates, trying to decide which one is the best, which I would keep. Now I could write down all the app’s names and search for them again one by one. However one of the apps I have is Astro File Manager, which has a built in app backup utility. So, I simply did a select all and backed up everything. The restore process was just as easy. A few apps need to be reconfigured such as WordPress (which I am using to write this) which is a mild annoyance, but the same as setting up email on the phone again.
This left the phone call and text messaging history. The phone call list isn’t a big deal. I use google voice so all the important calls are automatically stored already. This leaves text messages, which tend to go to my cell directly instead of google voice.
I used two apps to backup my texts. ‘SMS Backup’ and ‘SMS Backup & Restore’.
SMS Backup syncs your texts to your gmail account. You can define a tag that they are labeled as so they are easy to look up. They are handled in batches of 200 at a time, so if you have lots of texts, it can take a while. The coolest part of this tool is now all my texts are searchable along with my email. How cool is that?
The other tool is ‘SMS Backup & Restore’ which copies all texts to the SD card and then loads then back into the phone. It took a couple of seconds to backup over 1400 texts to the SD card and a few times longer to copy them back. Its nice having my text history.
Both of these SMS tools have an autobackup feature in them, which I have turned on in case my phone bites the dust.
